Phil Coulson's home for wayward Avengers
by damnedscribblingwoman
Summary: In which Natasha is a cat, Clint is pining, and Phil really needs to get a better lock.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: On the subject of things I do when I should be doing other things...**

* * *

"Black Widow is down."

Roger's voice sounds muffled and far away, and some detached part of Natasha's brain registers the fact she's no longer wearing her comm unit, but just then she has more pressing concerns. Everything's gone dark and there's something holding her down, restricting her movements, and the more she struggles against it, the more she gets tangled, the more she feels panic rising in her throat. One second she's pushing and fighting off whatever has her pinned down, the next she's out in the open and on for a bigger shock, because the whole world has changed around her — everything gone impossibly large.

"Holy fuck." She jumps, turning in one fluid motion only to see Iron Man hovering above her like something out of Gulliver's Travels. "Cap," he says, his voice slightly distorted through the armour's speakers, "we have a bit of a situation. Fuck. Watch out."

Natasha doesn't hold still long enough to watch him shoot down whatever is hurling towards them. The moment for stunned shock is over and now there's only panic and the instinct to seek shelter, a place to hide, anywhere that isn't the impossibly wide expanse of street and open sky. She dives under a parked car, huddling behind a wheel, her whole body shaking. Panic crowds out rational thought in a way that should have been impossible — the Black Widow _does not_ panic — but even through that haze of fear and confusion she's aware of the fact that she's wrong: wrong size, wrong shape, a world of wrongness in the rush of terror flooding her brain.

She holds very still, making herself small, listening to what's going on around her. There are shouts and explosions and the breaking of glass, and then silence. Footsteps approach the car, and she backs away from the sound. For a second nothing happens, and then a metal hand is lifting the front of the car as if it were weightless. Natasha hisses at the forms looming over her — desperate to flee but unwilling to turn her back on them. And part of her knows them, part of her recognises Steve and Tony and Wanda, but a bigger part of her is too freaked out to view them as anything but a threat.

"Iron Man, are you sure that's the Black Widow?" Steve makes to move closer, but Natasha jumps back, growling and hissing and ready to bolt.

"Dead sure. Fucking magic. No offence, Wanda."

"None taken." The Scarlet Witch drops to a crouch. "Natasha, it's us. It's okay. You're okay."

But none of it feels okay. Everything is too big and too loud and too bright, and every instinct she has is yelling at her to run, except she has nowhere to go — there are people all around her now and her only shelter is still being held up by Stark. Wanda reaches towards her only to snatch her hand away when Natasha claws at it.

"Now, that's not very nice," Tony says, a hint of a smile in his voice. "It's hardly her fault that—" He stops talking, and by the way they all go still, Natasha knows there's someone talking in their ear. Tony looks at Steve, who nods once, his expression troubled.

"Just so you know," Tony says, lowering the car back over her. "This is why people think you're prickly."

Everyone falls back — the Avengers, the agents who had been slowly approaching the car from behind, the two EMTs who had been hovering just a few feet away — until she's all alone, her heart hammering in her chest. She barely has time to be relieved before another set of footsteps has her tensing up again. The car rocks slightly when a man leans back against it.

"Do you ever miss the good old days?" Coulson's tone is even, conversational, as if he is commenting on the weather. "When all we had to contend with were drug lords and small-time dictators, and the occasional coup? The paperwork was so much easier." His voice is soothing, like a lullaby, reassuring in its familiarity. "Budapest, now that was a nightmare. And that time Barton managed to accidentally bring down the government of Tajikistan. I'm still filing forms on that one, three years after the fact. I think Hill comes up with new ones whenever she wants to punish me for something, like the SHIELD version of a rolled up newspaper to the nose. And that was before." Natasha slowly edges closer to him, her body low on the ground, almost a crawl. "Supervillains mean a lot of paperwork. Supervillains that destroy half of Manhattan on a regular basis mean even more."

Her heart-rate spikes when she abandons the relative safety of the car, but she's got enough control back that she holds her ground, stopping next to Coulson, her body almost flat against the asphalt. He looks down and their eyes meet.

"Hi there," he says, a soft smile on his lips. "I think you hurt Captain Rogers' feelings." The sound she makes is embarrassingly close to a whine — low and miserable — and Natasha is beyond glad Stark is nowhere near them. "I'm going to lean down," Coulson continues, "and pick you up. We'll go back to SHIELD headquarters, and a medical team is going to make sure there's nothing wrong with you apart from the obvious. And if you feel tempted to bite me, just remember I have it in my power to have you reassigned to Antarctica."

* * *

"SHIELD can't keep her from us." Steve doesn't shout, but his voice still fills Coulson's small office. "We have a right to see her and to take her home."

"Captain, there's a protocol in place-"

"SHIELD has a protocol for when one of your agents gets turned into a cat?" Sam sounds more amused than surprised.

"There are very few things we don't have a protocol for. As I was saying, Agent Romanov is under observation and will be kept here overnight. You may see her tomorrow."

"No offence, Coulson, but your science division is a joke that wouldn't know a cat if one hit them over the head. Seriously, those people need to get out more, loosen up some, interact with things not inside test tubes. And anyway, why go to the little leagues when you have me and Bruce right here? Give us some time with her and we'll figure it out. And if not, well, I always wanted a pet."

"Please, Stark," Bucky says, "let me be there when you call Natasha Romanov a pet to her face."

"And when she kills you," Sam adds, "I call dibs on the Porsche."

"Enough." Steve's voice is strained, tense. "This is not funny. Coulson, we're her team. She shouldn't be alone."

"She isn't, Captain. You have my word on that."

It takes a few more minutes and a lot more arguing before the Avengers finally leave, the door clicking shut behind them. For a moment everything is quiet in the office, the only sound the click-clack of the keyboard.

"You can't hide from them forever," Coulson finally says.

Natasha makes no reply but gets up from where she's sitting, in the darkest corner under the desk, and lies down closer to him, her head pillowed on his shoes.

She's not hiding. She's considering her options. Under a desk. Where they can't find her.

Natasha trusts her teammates as much as she has it in her to trust anyone, but it should surprise no one — it certainly does not surprise her — that her trust stretches no further than her ability to outfight, outwit or outrun any of them should the need arise. It's not something Steve would understand, not something any of them would, except maybe Bucky. Natasha doesn't do vulnerable well, and she certainly doesn't do it willingly. It's one thing to look harmless — and she's played that angle often enough — but a very different thing to actually _be_ harmless.

So she's hiding. Under a desk.

At least until she gets her bearings.

"I've contacted Victoria Hand." Coulson gets up, careful not to jolt her. "She's sending Barton back ahead of the rest of them." And wouldn't Hand just love that? She was always accusing Coulson of playing favourites with his agents.

The man disappears from view for a few seconds and comes back with a SHIELD backpack, which he opens on the floor in front of Natasha. "Hop on."

* * *

Coulson's apartment is much like Coulson himself — quiet and unassuming, and home to a surprising amount of Captain America memorabilia. There's a small living room that opens to a smaller kitchen, a reasonably-sized bedroom, a study and one bathroom. The windows in the living room open to the fire escape, there's no alarm, and the lock on the front door makes Natasha want to smack Coulson. She knows there's virtue in appearing unremarkable ( _No agents of secret, quasi-governmental agencies living here, folks_ ), but the keyword is appearing. A child could pick that lock.

"Don't give me that look," he says, loosening his tie. "I've lived here six years without any problems." She'll remind him of that when Hydra agents try to kill him in his sleep. "I'm going to go change. Make yourself at home. And Romanov," he adds, pausing on the door to the bedroom, "if I see claws anywhere near the couch, I'm dressing you up in an Iron Man onesie and handing you to Stark."

Cats can't roll their eyes, but she takes comfort from the fact that she's rolling them in spirit.

Despite the glaring security problems, she's still glad she's there and not at the Tower. Avengers Tower may be home, but just then she'd rather not deal with its open plans and bright lights and all-seeing JARVIS. Natasha the cat and Natasha the spider both understand the value of shadows when things are unsettled. Coulson's home is small and cosy and lived-in, with plenty of small spaces where she can hide when evildoers inevitably come to murder the fool of a spy who won't invest in a half-decent lock.

When Coulson comes back, he heads straight for the kitchen and Natasha follows. It's not the first time she sees him wearing something other than a suit — they've been in too many missions together, spent too many days holed up in the same safe houses — but there's something incredibly domestic about a Coulson who walks around barefoot in his own home, dressed in nothing but sweatpants and an old army t-shirt.

"I'm not sure I have much that's edible in here," he says, eyeing the contents of the fridge. Natasha can't see much from where she is on the floor, so she hops on the kitchen island. "There's left-over Chinese and left-over pizza. Can cats eat pizza? I could also make an omelette." He picks up the carton of eggs and frowns at the label. "Okay, I cannot make an omelette." He tosses it in the trash. "Pizza or Chinese?"

Natasha points at the Chinese food container with her paw, quietly judging his housekeeping skills. Really, the only thing the man has going for him is that a common thief is likely to do him in before he can die of malnutrition. She has seen terrorists living in holes in the desert who eat better than this.

"I once saw a Youtube video of a cat using a toilet. If he could, I'm assuming you'll figure it out."

Natasha doesn't dignify that with an answer, but carries on eating. When she gets her opposable thumbs back and finds out exactly who did this to her, she is going to take her sweet time making sure they understand in great detail why they should not have messed with the Black Widow. It will be slow and painful and will break a number of state, federal and international laws, but it's only a crime if she's caught, and she won't be, because she's Natalia Alianovna Romanova, star pupil of the Red Room, the Black—

"Don't make a mess," Coulson says, scratching the top of her head in passing. Natasha instinctively pushes against his fingers, closing her eyes with a contented sigh, and only then catches herself.

Murder. She's going to murder them. She's going to hunt them down and tie them up, and feed them their own bowels.

Coulson plops down on the couch, props his feet up on the coffee table and turns on the TV, and Natasha has but a second in which to hope he'll watch something half decent when he switches to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Because being turned into a cat wasn't bad enough.

She still hops down from the counter and makes her way to the living room. The food's gone, and she's cold and sleepy and vaguely curious about what's going on with Kendall, who was having some sort of crisis the last time Coulson made her watch an episode.

"Mind the upholstery," he says when she jumps on the couch, and Natasha really doesn't see why he should care; the thing looks like a rescue from goodwill.

She honestly means to sit on the opposite end, but for reasons known only to her cat brain, she ends up turning a few circles next to Coulson before lying down with her head on his leg.

Whatever. She once stopped him from bleeding out in Riyadh. He owes her.

After a second he places his hand on the back of her neck, running his fingers from the top of her head down, along the curve of her spine, every now and then stopping to scratch behind her ear, and Natasha has never felt more relaxed in her life. She no longer even cares that she's a cat, and when she finds whoever did this to her she might even decide to be generous and kill them quickly, and it's all because of Phil Coulson's magical hands. If Clint knows about these hands, it's no wonder he's been pining like a love-sick teenager for the better part of five years.

She startles herself by starting to purr, and Coulson chuckles. "Your secret is safe with me, Natasha." And really, with the amount of blackmail material she has on him, it better be. She closes her eyes and drifts off, lulled to sleep by bad reality television and Phil Coulson rubbing little circles on the back of her neck.

A noise outside wakes her up and she lifts her head, tense and alert, staring at the door.

"What is it?" Coulson sits up and reaches for the handgun she'd noticed earlier, attached to the underside of the coffee table.

The doorbell rings, loud and shrill, and Natasha barely has time to realise she's flown off the couch before she finds herself hiding under Coulson's bed, shaking.

Fucking cat reflexes.

She listens carefully to the sound of the door opening, knowing that whoever is on the other side is unlikely to be a threat, but still unable to convince the feline part of her brain that villains and evil organisations don't go around announcing their presence by ringing. The feline part of her brain doesn't care about villains or evil organisations. The feline part of her brain thinks doorbells are heralds of doom. Or possibly evil and out to get her. Or both.

The one good thing about being a cat, though, is that all her senses have been heightened, so she has no trouble hearing and recognising the voice that asks, "Where is she?"


	2. Chapter 2

_Clint! Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint, Clint!_

Natasha sprints from under the bed and out onto the living room, running all the way to the door, where she lunges at Clint, who catches her mid-air.

"Whoa," he says, holding her up at arm's length, his eyes wide. "You're— How—" He pauses for a moment, looking stunned, and then the corners of his lips curl up some, and before she knows it he has broken into fits of laughter that bring actual tears to his eyes, because he's a douche bag and the worst best friend ever, and she's not above peeing in his shoes. She growls and tries to swing her back legs to claw at him, which only makes Clint laugh all the more. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Nat, but you're a— Oh god, you're an orange tabby, and you got to admit that's pretty damn funny. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Here." He holds her against his chest, wrapping an arm under her for support. "I'm sorry the crazy villain of the week turned you into a cat. I promise you, you shall be avenged."

 _Yeah. You're hilarious._

"Did you get seen by medical?" Coulson asks, and Natasha feels Clint tense up.

"Of course, sir." She doesn't need to smell the blood or see the gash on his forehead to know that's a lie. "You know I'm a stickler for protocol."

Phil sighs. "Sit down, Barton. I'll get the first-aid kit."

"Wouldn't dream of being an imposition, sir," he calls after Coulson, with just enough bite to his tone to make Natasha wonder what the devil is wrong with him. It hasn't escaped her notice — it hasn't escaped anyone's notice — that Clint has been away a lot lately, doing overseas missions with Hand and Sitwell and Amador. Steve has been worried he has had a falling out with someone on the team. Tony has been making jokes about birds flying south for the winter. Natasha had just assumed he had done something to piss off Fury.

But now she wonders.

Clint is still holding her when he sits down on the couch, one hand petting her with the sort of nervous energy that makes Natasha wish she still had hands, so she could smack him over the head, because a) she's jittery enough without him using her as a furry stress ball, and b) it's the sort of tell agents with half his experience wouldn't be caught dead betraying. He's been taught better than that. _She_ has taught him better than that.

He lets go with a start when she bites the hand holding her. "What the hell was that for?"

Natasha turns on his lap and gets up on her hind legs, her front paws supported on his chest so she can look him in the eye.

"What?" he asks.

"Romanov, down." Coulson sits on the coffee table, across from Clint, and Natasha gets out of the way. There's more information to be gathered from watching anyway. And boy, is there plenty to see.

The most common words people use to describe Phil Coulson are bland, placid and unflappable — the man has the best poker face in the business — but Natasha has known him a long time, and she's never seen him this deliberately unreadable outside of an op. He quickly and efficiently cleans the laceration on Clint's forehead before slapping a couple of butterfly bandages on it, without so much as telling Clint off for blowing off medical.

And Clint is no longer fidgeting. In fact, he's very deliberately no longer fidgeting.

"So," Clint says, breaking the unusually uncomfortable silence, "any clue what did this to her? Or how to turn her back?"

"The Scarlet Witch is working with Dr Strange to determine whether it really is magic, and if it is, how to undo it." Coulson carefully puts everything away inside the first-aid kit. "Stark and Dr Banner want to examine her tomorrow and explore other avenues."

Exactly what she needs in her life: to become Tony's guinea pig.

"I'm sure she'll love that." Clint smiles and pokes her with a finger, which she immediately bites, because that's the only way to deal with traitorous friends who take pleasure in her pain. "Thank you for taking care of her." The smile he gives Coulson just then is softer and more genuine than any he's had since he walked through the door. The other man smiles back, a little more Phil and a little less Agent Coulson, and for a moment it's like everything is back to normal.

They stare at each other for just a second too long before Clint looks away.

"I'll take her back to the Tower with me," he says, picking her up and rising to his feet, but Natasha won't stand for it, and it's not even because her cat brain prefers Coulson's small home to the wide spaces of Avengers Tower, but because this is shaping up to be far more interesting than she had anticipated. She squirms in Clint's arms until he loosens his grip enough for her to jump back on the couch. "Okay, maybe I won't?"

"Leave her. She doesn't seem too eager to be around the other Avengers. She can stay here for a few days. It's not a problem. I'll take her with me to SHIELD tomorrow."

"Never took you for a cat person, sir." And that smirk right there is classic Barton, cocky and teasing and a little flirty.

"I'm full of surprises," Coulson says with the hint of a smile, and then they both seem to catch themselves and their faces go blank and their postures stiffen. It's like Natasha's stuck in the middle of the world's worst poker game. This is what happens when she stops paying attention for half a second. People make a mess of things that ought to be perfectly simple.

"Okay, so I, erm, I'm gonna get going." Clint grabs his jacket from the arm of the sofa and moves towards the door, but Natasha hasn't been SHIELD's most valuable asset since she joined for nothing. He hasn't taken two steps towards the door before she whimpers, head propped on her front legs, eyes wide and pleading. Clint spins around, surprised, and Coulson rolls his eyes, not even a little deceived. She whimpers again, more of a whine, and this would work so much better if she'd been turned into a puppy, but Natasha has long ago learnt to work with what she's got. "What?" Clint asks, kneeling in front of her and scratching the top of her head with a finger. She meows and bites down on his sleeve, not letting go.

"I think that means she wants you to stay." Coulson has the same tone he gets when Clint and Natasha have completely blown the parameters of a mission and there's nothing to be done but to go along with it. It's the tone of a man who's made his peace with the fact that his immediate future involves explosions and bullets and ducking for cover. "You can sleep on the couch."

That's a start, but Natasha can do him one better.

Coulson goes into the bedroom to get some clothes and a blanket for Clint, and Natasha follows him and jumps on the bed.

"Romanov, get down. You're not sleeping here."

That's as much as he knows.

She circles a spot a couple of times before rolling up into a ball, and gives him what she hopes passes for a forlorn look. If she's stuck in this form for a while, she really needs to find a mirror and practice her body language. It's rather hard to calculate effect in a body she's not used to. Coulson drops the clothes on the bed and stares down at her, hands on his hips.

"You weigh like six pounds. You know I can just carry you to the living room, right?"

Natasha rolls onto her back by way of reply, exposing her belly and pawing a little at the air. She's a cute little bundle of striped orange fur and grabby paws, and big, sad eyes. Coulson sighs, aggravated, but after a second scratches her chin.

"Don't think I don't know exactly what you're doing."

He usually does, and he usually lets her do it anyway.

She listens as he takes the things to Clint. Their voices are low and muffled, but while being a cat means she no longer has opposable thumbs, it does mean she has really great hearing.

"If this is too weird, I can just go," Clint says.

"No reason why it should be." And that tone right there — that all-business, SHIELD-approved tone — is no doubt a big part of the reason why Clint, who's always been a one-handler sort of guy, is suddenly making nice with Jasper Sitwell, and Akela Amador, and, strangest of all, Victoria Hand, whom he could never stand.

"Phil—"

"I can get you another pillow, if you want."

"No, this is fine."

She badly wants to roll her eyes and deeply resents the fact that she can't. Things were never this complicated when Clint was sleeping with her, and that was _after_ she tried to kill him.

Coulson comes back to the bedroom, leaving the door slightly ajar, and pulls back the bed covers over Natasha, who recognises petty revenge when she sees it. She scrambles from under the covers and lets out a mournful yowl, and this is great, she hadn't even know she could make this sound, but this is just what she needed.

"What now?" Coulson asks, and she does it again, longer this time, the sound vibrating in her throat. "Natasha, go to sleep."

She yowls again, a sad, inconsolable sound that reverberates in the small room. It's all heartbreak and despair, the deep distress of someone who's had her whole world turned upside down, whose very body has betrayed her, who's vulnerable and helpless and alone.

"Natasha, I am not above sedating you."

And she may never even get her body back. She may be stuck like this forever, unable to live her life, unable to defend herself, easy prey for every enemy she's ever made.

Someone on the floor below hits the ceiling with a broom.

"Natasha. Agent Romanov."

She'll waste away, her mind slowly vanishing until all that's left of the once great Black Widow is a common cat, with no skills, no accomplishments, and a seriously shortened—

"Oh, for the love of— Barton, get in here."

Score.

"Yeah?" Clint comes to the door, having already changed to the sweatpants and t-shirt Coulson lent him.

"Take the other side of the bed before Romanov gets me evicted."

"Yes, sir." Clint doesn't smirk, but there's an amused glint in his eye.

Natasha doesn't miss the way he flinches when he lies down, or the sharp inhale of breath. Coulson, whose back is turned to them, doesn't miss it either.

"You're getting seen by medical first thing tomorrow."

"I'm fine."

"First thing tomorrow, Clint."

"Yes, sir."

Coulson turns off the lamp that's on the nightstand on his side, and the room is enveloped in darkness. It takes only a few seconds for Natasha's cat eyesight to adjust. Clint is looking straight at her, though it's unlikely he can actually see her in the dark. His hand finds her and he feels the way to the top of her head, where he softly taps a message. KNOW WHAT UR DOING. CUT IT OUT.

Natasha traps his arm between her paws and taps back: a long tap, then a short tap, followed by three long taps.

NO.

She thinks Clint might argue, but all he does is lazily run his fingers through her fur, his eyelids dropping. Natasha gets up and moves closer to him, curling up against his chest. He's warm and solid, and Natasha doesn't even mind that she's purring again.

* * *

When she wakes up around four a.m., Coulson has rolled over, and she's now lying in the very narrow space between him and Clint. She yawns, instinctively stretching her paws against Coulson's chest.

"Nails," he mumbles, tapping one of her paws, and she immediately retracts her claws.

Clint shifts slightly behind her, muttering something about ninja spy assassins, and Phil chuckles. He doesn't move away when Clint throws an arm over him, and it isn't long before his breathing evens out again, and Natasha knows he's fallen back asleep.

She closes her eyes, no longer sleepy but far too comfortable to move, warm and snug between the two of them, Clint's arm partly over her. It's like being in a Clint-Phil fort, and she finds she minds it far less than she should. There's no version of her — cat, spider or otherwise — who likes feeling restrained, but this right here doesn't make her feel trapped. It makes her feel safe, and very few things do.

It's a soft, warm feeling born out of things that hadn't been at all soft or warm — years and years of ops gone to hell, and too many missions with no extraction plan nor any hope of one, and all the times one of them or all of them had bled next to or all over each other. It's Phil's calm, steady voice in her ear while the world falls apart around her ( _"On my mark, Romanov."_ ), and the arrows that always seem to find the one hostile she's missed. It's too many days and nights holed up in safe (and often not that safe) houses, listening to Clint whine about the crappy food kept there and the clearly evil agents that bought it ( _"Lentils, Nat! Lentils! Be nice to at least get a cyanide capsule to go with it.")_ while Phil ignores them both in favour of reading old Captain America comics ( _"Seriously, you can get them to stock those, but not half-decent food?" "He's an American hero, Barton." "_ _I'm_ _an American hero. A seriously underfed one. Sir."_ ).

Natasha does not love many people and she trusts even fewer, but these two idiots will always be her two glaring exceptions.


	3. Chapter 3

She jumps on the kitchen island, meowing at Coulson to feed her, but not really expecting him to, because she's seen the state of his fridge and can easily extrapolate the state of his pantry.

"We'll eat at headquarters." Colour her shocked. "Do you want coffee?" Please let the man never get an actual pet. She nods anyway, because she's not really a cat, and she's been hanging around Tony long enough for his unshakable belief that the day doesn't start until after the first cup of coffee — or four — to have rubbed off on her.

Coulson pours some into a bowl and places it in front of her. The moment her tongue touches the coffee, Natasha jumps back, gagging, desperate to get rid of the awful taste. Coulson laughs, the fiend.

"Want a saucer of milk instead?" he asks, his voice pleasant and friendly, but neither so pleasant nor so friendly that she can't hear the mockery in it.

And then, because somewhere there is a god, he almost chokes on his coffee when Clint appears in the doorway wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. "Mind if I borrow a change of clothes?" he asks, running a hand through his wet hair. The towel is obscenely low on his hips, and not even the tapestry of scars and bruises detracts from the fact that Clint cuts a striking figure, down to his utterly shameless grin.

"Go right ahead," Coulson says, still trying to catch his breath. The moment Clint disappears from view, Natasha snorts.

"Antarctica, Romanov."

Whatever. She's Russian. A little cold won't bother her.

* * *

Natasha is completely at peace with the whole cat situation. She's cool. She's collected. She's seen too much and been through too much to let something as small as being turned into a house cat throw her off her game. She's survived the Red Room, and alien invasions, and being Tony Stark's personal assistant. One time she was tortured by the Russian mob. Another time the Hulk tried to kill her.

And the least said about Budapest the better.

In comparison, this is practically a holiday. She can handle this. She _will_ handle this.

Her zen attitude does not survive the trip to the car. In fact, it does not survive the trip to the ground floor.

The previous day Coulson had carried her home inside a backpack, just enough of the zipper open that she could poke out her head if she chose to, but today in Clint's arms she feels vulnerable, exposed. The moment they're out of the apartment she becomes painfully aware of all the foreign smells and disembodied noises — traffic from the street, someone vacuuming on the floor above, a dog barking across the hall. All of it registers as a threat, and she'd laugh if she weren't so busy panicking.

A little fear is good. A little fear is healthy. It keeps her sharp and alert and on her toes. Natasha's been a spy for a very long time, and an assassin for longer, and cold-blooded enough even before that that it made those profitable career choices, but she's never forgotten that overconfidence will get her killed as sure as a bullet to the head, and likely just as quickly. A little fear is useful. A spy who is never afraid is a spy who won't live very long.

But she cannot remember a time when she was ever afraid of a group of noisy children on their way to school.

"Nat, I'm not a cat tree," Clint complains as they walk down the street, struggling to keep hold of her as she tries to climb up his chest, nails digging into him.

Coulson stops a few feet ahead of them and takes off his coat.

"Here." He drapes it over her, and she takes a deep breath, trying to calm down. It's just a street. It's just cars and people and the normal cacophony of early-morning chaos. None of it is a threat.

 _None of it is a threat. None of it is a threat. None of it is a threat._

She keeps repeating the sentence in her mind like a mantra, latching on to the shape and sound of the words, chasing the truth of them. It's dark under the coat, and that helps. It smells like Phil and Clint, and that helps too. She holds very still, eyes closed shut, focusing on the small but solid part of her mind that's silent and steady and human.

She doesn't retract her claws until they're safely in the car.

* * *

The fact that the Black Widow was turned into a cat by an unknown force is classified information, so naturally half of SHIELD and all of the New York division know about it, because they might be spies, but they're also gossipy old biddies.

The moment Clint walks into the main lab with Natasha, the nerd brigade is all over them.

"Oh, my goodness, she's precious," Jemma Simmons coos. She makes to pet her but stops short when Natasha bristles, a low growl in her throat.

"Yeah, I wouldn't do that if I were you." Clint taps one of her paws, a subtle reminder to Natasha that she needs to stop using him as a glorified pin cushion, but she's too worked up to pay him any mind. The lab is disturbingly bright and loud and odourless — something she had never realised before, but that feels deeply unnatural, even obscene, to her cat senses.

"Okay, oompa loompas, everyone out." Tony dismisses the information in one of the holographic screens, frowning at the one next to it. "That means you too, Fitz-Simmons," he adds without so much as glancing in their direction.

"It's our lab."

"I'm commandeering it. Out. Before I decide to test your Sleep-Tight Gun on you."

"It's called a Night-Night Gun, actually."

"Not helping, Fitz," Jemma whispers.

Bruce chooses that moment to walk in, which seems to be as much persuasion as any of them needs to vacate the premises.

"That's never not gonna give me a complex," he says with a rueful smile, glancing after the departing lab techs.

"Wasn't you, Bruce." Clint buries his fingers in her fur, rubbing soothing circles. "Between Tony and Natasha, I think they just felt unwelcome."

"Nonsense, I'm a delight." Tony leans down, his face at eye level with her. "Kitty Nat here, though, needs an attitude adjustment. What's new, pussycat?"

She isn't sure if the hiss that comes out of her is Cat Natasha objecting to the proximity or Human Natasha objecting to the epithets. Just then she's okay with either.

"You should be nicer to the guy who has it in his power to redecorate your suite while you're away." He straightens up and takes a sip of what has to be at least his fifth cup of coffee of the day. "I'm thinking a Hello Kitty theme, with a touch of Garfield. How do you feel about Mondays?"

Tony has a death wish, and one day someone — probably not her, but if there's any justice in the world, her — will choose to humour him.

"How has she been?" Bruce frowns at the info on his tablet. "Medical didn't so much as do a blood test."

"Skittish." Gee, thanks, Clint. "If some fool actually tried to get a blood sample from her yesterday, they probably did not live to chart it."

Bruce asks another question, but Natasha is no longer listening. Something has caught her attention on the floor and for a moment she's frozen in place, unable to do anything but stare. And then it moves and she's off, jumping off Clint's arms in one fluid motion. She lunges at it, nothing in her mind but the urgency to get it, to capture it, to catch it. She catches nothing but air and stops for a moment, confused, and then spots it again and makes a dash for it, chasing it across the floor with single-minded focus, determined not to let it get away. It's fast, but she's faster, she's better, she's the Black Widow, and this red dot—

It's the snigger — familiar and aggravating and Tony-like — that makes her stop short, suddenly aware of the fact she's chasing a damn red dot across the lab floor. She glares at the three men. Bruce has the good grace to at least try to hide his amusement with another comment about the deficiencies of SHIELD medical, and Clint seems to remember she knows how to disappear people, because he quickly agrees that medical is the worst, and he, for one, never sees any reason to humour them.

Tony grins, brazen and shameless, and puts the laser pointer away.

"Cat got your tongue?" he asks.

Natasha jumps on the table and walks along the edge of it towards Tony, knocking his StarkPhone to the floor without pausing.

"That was uncalled for," he says, still grinning.

She sits next to the still half-full mug he set down, and stares at him for a moment. And then, carefully and deliberately, she raises her left paw and slowly extends it towards the mug.

"Natasha, don't you dare." He points at her, accusingly. "I will do unspeakable things to your Widow's Bite. With glitter. And pink spray paint. And a theme song. Tom Jones will play every time you shock someone. Do not test me."

The mug shatters on the floor, sending shards and coffee flying, and Tony knocks her on her side, fingers digging into her fur. "Fiend," he says with a smile that's all fondness and mock injury. Natasha traps his hand with her front paws and kicks with her back ones, careful not to use her claws, and bites his fingers with more enthusiasm than force. She stops at the sound of a camera shutter and looks over at Clint, who's pointing his phone at them.

"This one's going on Facebook." She hisses at him, but it's a half-hearted thing, mostly because Tony is scratching her ear and it's all she can do not to purr. "I've got to go." Clint puts his phone away, still smirking. "Actually have to get seen by medical before Coulson puts me on paperwork for a month. Can you guys—"

"We've got her." Tony picks her up, and Natasha surprises herself by letting him. "Don't worry, Tweety Bird, we'll take good care of her."

Clint leaves and Natasha does not whimper, because she's an adult and a professional, and the part of her brain that's more cat than human might be an exasperating collection of haywire emotions and embarrassing tells, but it still has to share space with the Black Widow, who's anything but. So she makes herself hold very still and stays where she is, in Tony's arms, focusing on him and pointedly ignoring the fact that some part of her — some foolish, misguided, clearly-under-the-influence-of-black-magic part of her — finds Tony soothing.

He smells of coffee and motor oil, and his fingers are calloused where they press into her fur, and he talks a mile a minute, because Tony Stark cannot abide silence, and Natasha finds it all strangely relaxing. The part of her that once debated the merits of breaking his neck rather than spend another minute as his assistant likes to think that she finds him calming because she doesn't see him as a threat, but Natasha is nothing if not a realist and she's honest enough with herself to know that mostly she finds him soothing because he tricked her cat brain with a laser point and ear rubs.

Whatever. There's plenty of secrets she'll take to her grave. She can handle one more.

The holotable he sets her on is cold under her paws, and she briefly mourns the loss of contact when Tony lets go. And then the whole thing lights up and a number of holographic projections pop up around her — images and graphs and rolling text, and the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, because things weren't bad enough without them putting her on top of what amounts to a really fancy polygraph.

The beeping speeds up as she instinctively backs away, but Tony doesn't let her get very far.

"Easy there, Figaro," he says, moving her back to the centre of the table. "We need time for science to work its magic."

Odds are good that either science or magic or an unholy combination of the two got her into this mess, so she's not terribly inclined to humour either one, and certainly not on top of a contraption that's freaking out both her cat self and her human self. Unfortunately for her, however, Tony never once let anything get between him and what happen to be two of his favourite things in the world — the pursuit of science and getting on someone's nerves — and he's not about to start now.

His attention is split between focusing on the flood of information hovering above her and making sure she stays where she is, but he still manages to keep up a constant stream of chatter, because Tony loves nothing more than the sound of his own voice, and he has plenty to say, starting with how she better appreciate the fact he's lowering himself to working in subpar conditions when they could be doing all of this in the Tower, where he has all his cool toys and Nick Fury can't see him.

And she better not think for a moment that he missed the fact that she ditched them for Agent and Legolas, because it hasn't. And it's not that he cares that she prefers Maison du Coulson to her apartment at the Tower (the luxurious, top-of-the-line apartment he designed specifically for her, run by a one-of-a-kind AI who sides with her in every single argument despite the fact that he created the ungrateful tangle of code). No, he doesn't care about that, but Cap has been brooding for the better part of twenty-four hours, and she should know that Tony can't stand when Cap broods — it's all manly and dignified and all-American, and it just sits wrong with him.

No part of his monologue — for that's what it is, and if Tony ever goes the villain route he certainly has that part down — really requires an answer, not even the comments meant for Bruce about re-calibrating the modulator and changing the query parameters, and does Bruce think that maybe this whole thing is Reindeer Games' girlfriend's idea of a joke? Maybe it's all part of an elaborate Asgardian courting ritual. Midgardians send flowers, Asgardians turn the enemies of their beloveds into furry creatures. Someone should ask Thor.

Bruce hums his agreement distractedly while going over the data on his tablet. Natasha has been keeping an eye on him, but most of her focus is on Tony, who has extensive practice in making sure he's the centre of attention wherever he is. That, coupled with the mayhem of sensory input from the holotable and assorted equipment means she misses the precise moment Bruce puts down the tablet and moves closer to her until he says, "We'll need to run a blood test as well."

She does not move — through sheer force of will she does not move — but the heart monitor goes crazy and a number of displays flash red above her. Tony hisses when she digs her claws into his hand.

"Easy there, scaredy cat. No needles, got it."

Bruce, who had stopped short, takes another careful step towards the table, but Natasha is having none of it. She lets go of Tony's hand and rolls to her feet, hissing a warning, body low and ears flat against her head. And enough of it is the genuine alarm of her cat brain, who can sense the Hulk even if she can't see him — a bigger, more dangerous predator hiding just out of sight — but much of it is for show, and Natasha might almost feel bad over Bruce's hurt expression, except that she doesn't, really.

Bravado is for amateurs. The single most important thing she's ever learnt is to recognise and accept whatever limitations exist — the situation's, other people's, her own. Maybe a scratch won't be enough to get the Hulk to come out and play, but her control is shaky at best and somewhere in the medical ward there's a bed taken up by a young, cocky junior doctor who can attest to the fact that she can do a little worse than a mere scratch. It's not a chance she's willing to take, so she hisses and growls and plays up the terrified kitten act until Bruce backs away, his stricken expression replaced by a carefully neutral look.

"I'll go over the data later," he says. "There are a few things I need to discuss with Fitz-Simmons while we're here."

Tony waits until Bruce is out of the room and then tuts her, pulling her legs from under her so she's lying down on her side again. "Man, you are on fire, you know that? Any other Avenger whose heart you wanna rip out? Maybe I can bring Sam over and you can ambush him or something." Natasha ignores him — she's got plenty of practice doing just that — and lets the soothing feeling of his fingers on her fur calm her down.

Bruce will get over it, as will Steve, as will Tony — who always takes things more to heart than anyone gives him credit for, and who built them all the perfect home so that no one would ever want to leave, because that's what you do when you're very rich and a little crazy, and have enough abandonment issues to fill the Grand Canyon.

She kneads his arm with her front paws, careful to keep her claws retracted, and licks his finger when he makes to scratch her chin. Natasha doesn't often do apologetic, but she doesn't often do jumpy either. They're all living in a brave new world.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time Tony brings her back to Coulson's office, Natasha has been poked, prodded and bullied for what feels like hours, and she's about ready to murder someone — not some random someone either, no. A very specific someone, a someone with too much time on his hands and too much caffeine in his system, and a penchant for listening to music at levels that would be absurd even if she didn't have the enhanced hearing of a cat.

"Here you go, Agent. Good as new."

"Found anything?"

"Found any— Agent, you wound me. I'm a bona fide genius. Mensa doesn't have tests that can accurately measure my IQ level. I'm literally off the charts. I built the Mark I with scrap metal and duct tape in a hole in the desert. I'm almost insulted by the question."

"So nothing?"

"No, not a damn thing. In my defence, I'm being forced to work with substandard equipment."

"SHIELD facilities don't live up to a hole in the desert?"

"I know. I was shocked as well."

Natasha can almost see the effort Phil makes to keep his expression neutral. "Anything at all you can tell me?"

"Nothing medical couldn't have told you. Her DNA is human, her vitals are normal and she has the reflexes of a very temperamental but otherwise perfectly healthy hellcat. Don't try to rub her belly; you'll lose a hand. Other than that, I don't know, don't get her wet and don't feed her after midnight. I've sent the data I got to JARVIS. Bruce and I will go over it at the Tower, and I might also contact Dr Foster, get her take on it. Hell, if we get desperate enough, I might even bring in Richards, though you know what that does to my blood pressure. But as far as I can tell, it's some mumbo-jumbo voodoo crap. Wanda might have better luck."

Three hours as a science experiment and all she has to show for it is a piece of questionable 80s pop-wisdom. Her sense of injury might be greater if she weren't so incredibly sleepy. Their words drift around her, but Natasha's no longer paying attention. She closes her eyes for a second, only to wake up with a start when she starts to topple forward.

Tony chuckles. "She's beauty, she's grace…" The gentle mockery is not lost on her, but Natasha lacks the energy to care. She hops on Coulson's letter tray and lies down on it, dozing off almost immediately. Cats need sleep. Cats who've spent most of the morning dealing with Tony Stark need even more sleep.

She's vaguely aware of Tony leaving, and briefly wakes up when Coulson tells her off for getting between him and an expense report. Warm hands lift her from the desk and she purrs against his chest, still half asleep. Phil is unmoved by her impression of a small, furry engine. She's a cat, not a paperweight, and he'll thank her not to nap on his memos. He sets her down on the couch, and Natasha moves just enough to curl into a more comfortable position. The blanket he covers her with smells like Clint, who spends more time napping in Coulson's office than sleeping in his own bed, and she briefly remembers that she really needs to look into what is going on with these two idiots, but first she's going to close her eyes for a few minutes.

A few minutes turn into a few hours, turn into most of the afternoon. Coulson's days when he's not in the field involve a lot of paperwork, and he taps away at his keyboard — a soothing, lulling sound. People come in at various points throughout the afternoon: junior agents, a man from R&D, an intern who had been sent out in search of a cat carrier.

Jasper Sitwell drops by to let him know that May has finally caught on to the fact they've been replacing her coffee with decaf for the better part of a month, which means Bob from HR has won the pool, and can Coulson even believe that? Bob. From HR.

Melinda May drops by to let him know Sitwell is full of shit and about to have a very unfortunate accident involving a quinjet, one of Doom's confiscated toys, and a one-way trip to Belize. And on that note, if Coulson could put together the requisition forms for the quinjet, she might just discover she doesn't really need him to file three reports and seven different forms (four of which need to be filed in triplicate) to explain how he let one of SHIELD's top assets — an Avenger, no less — get turned into a cat. So, yeah. Quinjet requisition forms. Today would be great.

Maria Hill drops by to tell him that "To disappear Sitwell" is not a valid reason to requisition a quinjet, and if Coulson finds himself with too much time on his hands there's still paperwork pending from that time Barton managed to bring down the government of Tajikistan.

Natasha dozes on and off through most of it, alert enough to hear what's going on, but not bothered enough by any of it to actually get up. She's warm and comfortable and safe, and it's not as if there's anything she should be doing — what with being a cat and all — so she's happy to enjoy her little interlude.

And then someone barges in, the door hitting the wall with a bang, and she almost jumps out of her skin.

"Coulson, do I look like someone afflicted with an overabundance of free time to you?" Nick Fury doesn't do quiet unless he has to, and he very seldom has to. "Do I look like someone who spends his days in idleness, just waiting for the opportunity to drag my ass down here to deal with the crap my subordinates get up to?"

"Is there something on your mind, Director?"

"Is there— Yes, there's something on my motherfucking mind. Care to explain to me why two — TWO — of SHIELD's finest are asking to transfer out of the Avengers Initiative?"

She sits up straighter at that, the curiosity of the spider trumping the mild terror of the cat. Coulson looks unruffled, but then, he always does.

"I wasn't aware someone else had put in a transfer request."

"Bullshit. You know perfectly well someone else did and you know perfectly well who. And I'll tell you right now I won't have it. You and Barton better get your fucking act together. And what's more, If he wants to keep going on field trips with Hand or whoever, he can do it on his own fucking time. In my agency assets don't get to pick and choose their assignments. This isn't the fucking CIA."

"Director—"

"Save it. I don't wanna hear it. Romanov, handle this nonsense before I throw these two idiots in the Cube for pissing me off." And with that he storms off, the door rattling in the frame behind him.

Coulson stares at the door for a few seconds and then turns his attention back to the laptop, and the clack clack clack of the keys resumes. He doesn't say a word, doesn't so much as spare Natasha a glance, as if by ignoring her hard enough he can just pretend the last few minutes didn't happen. It either denotes a remarkable amount of naivete on his part, or a remarkable amount of optimism, because Natasha is rested, Natasha is alert, and Natasha doesn't need opposable thumbs to ferret information out of someone, even if that someone happens to be Phil Coulson of SHIELD — master spy, experienced agent, handler extraordinaire.

She jumps on the desk and stares at him over the laptop's screen. Coulson pointedly ignores her for several minutes, before finally saying without slowing down the rapid movement of his fingers, "I'll talk to him. Clint's not transferring out of the Avengers."

Of course he isn't. She'll shoot him with one of his own arrows before she lets him go anywhere. And if she's still a cat, she'll have Barnes shoot him with one of his own arrows. Point is, Clint isn't going anywhere. But that's not really what she wants to know, and Coulson is being purposefully obtuse.

Natasha balances on her hind legs and pushes down the screen of the laptop with her front ones. Coulson, who narrowly avoids getting his fingers caught, raises an eyebrow at her.

"I said I'll take care of it."

She doesn't make a sound and doesn't move a muscle, happy to just sit and stare, the laptop pleasantly warm under her. It's a waiting game, and she was always good at those even before she got turned into a creature with the vocabulary range of a houseplant. Human beings dislike silence. It makes them uncomfortable and fidgety. Given enough time they'll instinctively try to fill it. And Coulson is good, Coulson is very good, but she's better, and she has two things going for her. First, people are more likely to disclose information to someone they feel close to, and it's no secret that Coulson always favoured his two murderous strays. And second, she looks like a kid's plaything — cute and cuddly and harmless. It lowers people's inhibitions, even if they know better, which Coulson does.

"I kissed him." And there it is. "It was inappropriate and unprofessional and I shouldn't have, but I did. And things have been… strained since." Coulson sighs, a frustrated expression flickering across his face. "He's an Avenger. I won't let him transfer out of the Initiative. But he needs to work with someone he feels comfortable with, and that's no longer me. No one is irreplaceable. You know that, I know that, and Fury knows that too. The Director will make his peace with the idea of a new liaison between SHIELD and the Avengers." He moves her down from his laptop and she lets him. "And on that note," he adds, no longer looking at her, "quit playing the damsel in distress to get us in the same room together. You're not fooling anyone and it just makes him uncomfortable."

Natasha very much doubts that. Raisins in chocolate make Clint uncomfortable. Wanda levitating his bow to the ceiling when he annoys her makes Clint uncomfortable. Having to explain to May why he just blew through an entire month's supply of exploding arrows in one afternoon makes Clint uncomfortable ( _"I swear to god, she's the scariest fucking woman I've ever met. No offence, Nat."_ ).

Being in the same room as Phil Coulson does not make him — has never once made him — uncomfortable, and for someone usually so good at reading people, Phil is being exceptionally dense. Not that it surprises her. He's the smartest man she knows — and Natasha knows Tony Stark and Bruce Banner — but when it comes to Clint he's always had a blind spot the size of Mount Rushmore.

Intel is only as good as its source, and right now her source is useless. She needs Clint's take on this mess, but he's been making himself scarce since the morning. Unless the medical staff has him strapped down on a bed somewhere as payback for all the times he's evaded their well-intentioned attempts to glue him back together, that's deliberate. It's possible he's avoiding Coulson (Coulson certainly seems to think so), but just as likely that he's avoiding her. She can't manipulate him into doing what she wants him to do — or into telling her what she wants to know — if she can't find find him.

Or so he likes to think.

Coulson's working hours are erratic at best — which goes a long way towards explaining the deplorable state of his fridge — but since he has another mouth to feed and the world isn't in immediate mortal danger (villains always seem to take Tuesdays off, for some reason), he decides to call it a day, so that they can go grocery shopping.

Now, Natasha doesn't have an awful lot of experience with grocery shopping — JARVIS handles that sort of thing at the Tower, and before that she lived at SHIELD HQ, and before that, well… let's just say her life's never had much space for domesticity — but given the amount of frozen meals Phil picks up, to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, she suspects he's doing it wrong.

She silently judges him from the safety of the cat carrier, which is currently in the shopping cart, surrounded by frozen lasagnas and instant mac 'n cheese. Coulson hasn't zipped it all the way, so she can get out if she needs or wants to, but she's happy to stay put. The noise and the smells and the amount of people still grate on her nerves, but it's easier to bear in the small, darkened, slightly-cold-from-all-the-frozen-products space.

It's still a relief when they make it back to Coulson's building. It's early evening and the street lights have started to come on. They're almost on Coulson's floor, having walked up seven flights of stairs, when they run into a young woman, who's making her way down.

"Hey, Phil. How's it going?" The Jack Russell on her arms starts barking at Natasha, who immediately bristles, hissing and growling in return. "Settle down, Pablo." Pablo does settle down some, which is more than Natasha can manage. "Sorry about that. He doesn't like cats."

"Don't worry about it. Visiting your mom?"

"Yeah. She was babysitting Pablo. Thought I'd come and rescue him before she fed him another chicken. She spoils him rotten." She points at the bag Coulson's carrying. "I'm surprised to see you went shopping."

"Hmm?"

"Just ran into your assistant upstairs. He was carrying a bunch of grocery bags."

That gets Natasha's attention. Going by the way he changes his hold on the cat carrier, it gets Phil's too.

"You know, I completely forgot he was supposed to bring by groceries today." He keeps his tone light and pleasant, but there's tension in the way he holds himself that hadn't been there a few seconds ago. "Well, I better go. Good to see you, Annie."

"Good to see you, Phil."

Coulson's floor, when they get there, is deserted, and his door is slight ajar. Phil silently puts down the cat carrier and the grocery bag, and motions at Natasha to stay put. He reaches for his gun and moves towards the door, quiet as a ghost. Natasha pushes the zipper open and follows him, because while she may be somewhat more susceptible to the fight or flight response than usual, she's a cat, not a bunny, and in a pinch her claws will serve her just as well as her Widow's Bite, if perhaps less effectively.

Whoever is inside the apartment is making no great efforts to conceal his presence, and they can hear him humming the melody to Bad Romance all the way from the entrance. Coulson stops at the door to the kitchen, his weapon trained on the man's back.

"Hands where I can see them," he says, his voice steady. The man starts and drops the lettuce he was holding, his hands shooting up on either side of his head. "Turn very slowly," Phil adds, taking another step into the room. The other man slowly turns, and man might be a generous descriptor. He doesn't look a day over eighteen. "Who are you?"

"I'm Jeremy, sir. Jeremy Turner. I'm, erm, I'm with SHIELD?"

"Is that a question, Jeremy?"

"No, sir. I'm— I mean to say, I'm an intern with SHIELD."

"Do you have ID to back that up?"

"Yes, sir. In my pocket, sir. If I can just—"

"Go ahead. Slowly."

Jeremy, who looks younger than Natasha has ever felt, slowly reaches into his pocket and gets out a SHIELD ID card, which he sets down where Coulson can see it. Natasha hops on the kitchen island to take a closer look, and the kid jumps back, looking even more ashen than before.

It's gratifying to know that orange fur notwithstanding, she's still able to strike fear in the heart of men.

Taking pity on him, Coulson finally lowers his gun.

"Why exactly are you in my kitchen?"

"Erm, well, you see, sir—"

"Take your time, Jeremy. You're not in trouble."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. It's just complicated. You see, part of my job is to bring coffee to a number of senior agents, including Agent May. Agent May takes her coffee black, no cream, no sugar, just strong, black coffee. Only Agent Sitwell has been making me exchange her coffee for decaf for some weeks now."

"This relates to you being in my kitchen how?"

"It all comes together eventually sir, I promise. You see, I didn't want to deceive Agent May, but Agent Sitwell said it was all in good humour, and she'd find it funny, and that he outranked me ten times over, so I had to do as he said. Only it turns out she did not find it funny. Like, at all. And I don't know if you've met Agent May, sir, but she can be fairly terrifying."

"Go on."

"Well, Agent Barton said he could smooth things over with Agent May, but I had to do something for him in exchange, which was to go buy some groceries and bring them here. He even gave me a list. And he said you knew all about it and would really appreciate it."

"Jeremy, does it occur to you that your life might be easier if you stopped doing the bidding of people clearly bent on mischief?"

"Yes, sir. It does, sir."

"How did you get in?"

"I picked the lock, sir."

Coulson raises an eyebrow at that. "You picked the lock?"

"Yes, sir. Agent Barton said it would be easy, sir. He said it was deliberate, that you had such a 'pathetic, flimsy excuse of a lock' — those were his words, sir, not mine — for just such occasions."

"Agent Barton said my lock was easy to pick because I wanted people to be able to break in and deliver groceries, and you believed him?"

"In hindsight that might have been unwise, sir."

"Indeed. Did he give you money for the groceries?"

"He gave me Agent Sitwell's credit card." Jeremy fishes it out of his pocket and sets it next to his SHIELD ID. "Said Agent Sitwell had given it to him for this express purpose, in his capacity as SHIELD's Official Provider of Goods."

"That's not a thing, Jeremy."

"No, sir, I didn't think it was."

Coulson looks appraisingly at the boy, who looks a little less like he's about to pass out. "I'm going to keep this," he finally says, reaching for the credit card, "and give it back to Agent Sitwell."

"Yes, sir."

"No reason for him to know you had it."

"Thank you, sir."

"Was there any ice cream?"

"Sir?"

"On Agent Barton's list."

Jeremy smiles at that, his shoulders relaxing somewhat. "Yes, sir. Peanut Buttercup Ben & Jerry's and Strawberry Cheesecake Haagen Dazs. They're already in the freezer."

Phil smiles back, a soft, friendly smile designed to put people at ease. "I'll have a word with Agent May tomorrow and tell her to stop scaring off my interns."

Jeremy's relieved expression is almost comical. "That would be really great, sir."

"I take my coffee with milk and two sugars."

"Yes, sir."

"Alright, get out of here."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Jeremy is almost at the door when he turns back. "Almost forgot. There was a card to go with the groceries." He hands it to Coulson who chuckles at the message before setting it down for Natasha to see. There's no signature, but Clint's careless scribbles are unmistakable.

It reads: "She gets testy if you don't feed her. PS.: If high schoolers can get in, so can bad guys. Change your lock."


	5. Chapter 5

Natasha and Coulson sit on the couch most of the evening, watching Project Runway and eating ice cream. (Coulson is eating ice cream. Natasha is mostly taking advantage of the fact he keeps forgetting "the Internet said cats shouldn't eat ice cream" and letting her lick bits of it off his fingers.) It's a nice, relaxing evening — the world isn't in immediate danger, Tim Gunn is surprisingly captivating, and peanut butter cup is the ultimate ice cream flavour. It would be perfect, except that Coulson won't stop fidgeting. It isn't even terribly overt fidgeting, but it's fidgeting nonetheless, and it's driving Natasha to distraction.

He does not get up, does not interrupt the lazy way his fingers comb through her fur, but she can feel him tense up every now and then, can see the way his gaze keeps turning to the silent phone on the coffee table, or the clock on the wall, or the door. It's subtle and restrained, and the Phil Coulson version of obsessively checking his phone for messages.

Clint isn't coming, and she could have told him that. Hawkeye has zero self-preservation instincts when it comes to running into the line of fire, or taking on monsters, or jumping off buildings — fearlessly, recklessly, without so much as a grappling hook — but Clint Barton has them in spades when it comes to dealing with feelings of any sort. The previous day she'd startled him out of whatever pity party he had going on by turning into a cat, but that trick wouldn't work twice.

He won't call, he won't text, and he most certainly won't show up. He'll do something ridiculous and over-the-top like conning an intern named Jeremy into buying groceries and breaking in, which is exactly what he did, and that will be that.

Coulson, no doubt reaching that same conclusion, sits up straighter and reaches for his phone, typing a quick message. He doesn't stop her trying to read it, and she doesn't pretend to be uninterested. It's too late in the evening for spy games. The message reads, _Meeting tomorrow. 10am. Conference room C. Don't be late._

Not exactly the stuff of Shakespeare.

A reply comes not a minute later. _Shipping out with Amador at 0600._

Coulson stares at the screen for a few seconds before typing, _That wasn't a suggestion, Barton. 10am. Conference room C._

Nothing happens for several minutes, and Natasha can almost see the tug of war between the part of Clint that has serious, deep-seated problems with authority and the part of him that really, really, _really_ likes having Coulson telling him what to do.

When the phone finally vibrates, enough time has passed for whatever was in fashion at the beginning of that particular Project Runway episode to have now become hopelessly démodé.

The message only reads, _Yes, sir_.

* * *

Natasha is bored. She's bored and curious and annoyed — annoyed enough that she can't even nap to pass the time. It's ten fifteen, and Coulson and Clint are off having their secret meeting in Conference Room C, where she can't hear them, because Coulson is all about the flow of information when he's lounging on his couch full of sugar, but not so much at any other time.

And she's stuck in his office, because the door is closed and she has no opposable thumbs, and even if she did, the outside world is no friend of hers these days, so she'd be staying put regardless, and she hates it. She hates that closed the door, and the fact that she wouldn't know what to do with it even if it were open, and the fact that Phil Coulson is an underhanded bastard that will gleefully keep her away from perfectly good intel out of petty malice and a misplaced sense of privacy.

She glares at the laptop on the desk. If she still had hands she could use it to hack the security feed, but if she still had hands she would not have found herself in her current predicament.

It's not even that it's terribly important intel. She's sure to get the information out of Coulson or Clint or both, but she's bored and annoyed, and overwhelmed by the crushing awareness of her own shortcomings.

Natasha's unique skill set has always served her and her employers well. It's the questionable result of natural ability and the sort of hard work made of lessons burned into flesh and bone, talent turned instinct and muscle memory by virtue of enough repetition and enough blood spilt — hers as often as not. It's hard-won and hard-kept, and has made her a particularly coveted asset in the intelligence community. There's a whole alphabet of agencies who'd give up their yearly budget for the chance to get the Black Widow on a mission. There isn't a target she can't take down, or a mark she can't con, or information she can't get her hands on.

Or there wasn't.

Because now she's cat stuck in a room, with no way to get out, no way to get the information she wants, no way to do anything but wait and stew in her own sense of inadequacy.

Maybe when she finds Clint they can both have a pity party together.

She glances at the desk again and curses herself for a fool. She doesn't need hands. She needs to use her damn head.

Natasha jumps on the desk and knocks the phone's receiver out of the base. The dial tone is loud and clear to her enhanced hearing. The keys are too close together for her to press them without her paw hitting neighbouring keys, but she uses a claw instead and that works just fine. She presses the code to call out of SHIELD's internal network, followed by the phone number, followed by her personal code, and then she waits. Got to love old-fashioned tech. She couldn't have done this with a smartphone. It rings twice before the call connects.

"Good morning, Agent Romanov. How may I be of assistance?"

Jackpot.

She worries for a second that JARVIS is simply too modern to know Morse code, but she really shouldn't have, because JARVIS knows everything — or if not everything, certainly much more than Tony ever thought to personally teach him. It's a system designed to learn, and learn it has.

JARVIS has no qualms about hacking SHIELD, and no difficulty either. That's maybe because he really _is_ that good, but probably because Fury has long ago learnt that the best way to deal with Tony Stark is to let him ransack the kitchen so he won't think to look under the bed. The Director is smart, smart enough to know that it's always safer to steer into the skid.

The screen of Coulson's laptop comes alive and Natasha watches as JARVIS bypasses several layers of security before accessing the camera feeds. He's just reached the floor where Conference Room C is located when alarms start blaring right outside Coulson's office. Natasha chokes down the instinctive need to run for cover and makes herself stay put, body flat against the desk, claws digging into the wood. Her heart is going a mile a second and for a moment she's too terrified even to understand what JARVIS is saying.

The camera feed on the monitor shows a STRIKE team running down a corridor and through a door at the end of the hall, lights flashing in time with the alarm.

Natasha forces herself to focus. She's not a cat. She's not a cat and she's safe. Whatever is going on, she's safe in Coulson's office. It's just an alarm. It's loud and unpleasant, but it's just an alarm. It's not dangerous. Just annoying.

Just annoying.

She's not a cat.

She forces her claws to retract and makes herself sit up. She's not a fucking cat and she won't be cowed by the loud noises of a glorified bell. She needs to know what's going on and whatever JARVIS has been saying has completely gone over her head, so she asks him to repeat.

"There was an explosion in one of the labs, Agent. It is not known at this time what caused it, but Dr Banner was standing in the explosion radius, so—"

Oh boy.

"Several STRIKE tams have been dispatched. There are two lab techs trapped in the lab with the Hulk. One was knocked unconscious by the explosion, but the other seems mostly unarmed for now."

'For now' being the key part of that sentence. The Hulk does not like explosions, small spaces or laboratories, and he certainly does not care for the conjugation of all three.

She taps her claws on the wood almost mechanically, her attention split between asking JARVIS to show her the lab and trying to figure out what if anything she can do. JARVIS switches the image to the correct camera feed and it shows pretty much the sort of mayhem Natasha would expect. The room is unrecognisable, half of it demolished by either the explosion, Banner's less than friendly alter ego, or both, and the Hulk is bellowing in the centre of the screen, lashing out at anything within reach.

And because things weren't bad enough, just then some moron decides to open fire and all hell breaks lose. The Hulk charges in the direction of the bullets, which causes the whole lot of cowardly, spineless, brainless idiots qualifying for STRIKE these days to open fire as well. What do they figure firing at the Hulk is going to do except piss him off?

Changing tactics, the green guy grabs a table and throws it at them, causing the tech who was hiding under it to scurry away to a corner of the room.

This is a fucking disaster.

The quickly taps "Avengers" and "Elevator", and jumps down from the table without waiting for a reply, trusting JARVIS to get it. She eyes the door handle for a moment before jumping up and trying to catch it. It takes five tries and almost as many misses for her to finally manage to get the door open. The corridor outside is deserted, for which she is glad, because the fucking alarm is about as much sensory input as she can take at the moment and not freak out.

 _Don't freak out, don't freak out, don't freak out._

She darts to the elevator and the doors open just as she's about to reach it, because JARVIS has mathematical precision on his side.

"Sir is en route, Agent Romanov," he says through the speakers in the elevator as it descends. "And Agents Barton and Coulson have just reached the location of the incident."

The doors of the elevator open and Natasha freezes. At least a dozen STRIKE agents in full battle gear have their weapons trained on the entrance to the lab, from which smashing noises and the Hulk's guttural screams can be heard. The air is thick with smoke, and the smell of burning plastic and charred flesh and chemicals. The alarm is even louder down here, but not loud enough to drown out the Hulk, and every instinct Natasha has is yelling at her to run for cover, to find somewhere small and dark and hidden and stay there, where no one can find her, least of all the terrifying predator in the next room.

And it should have been impossible for her to move — she who can't handle early-morning traffic or rowdy children or loud noises — but this deep, instinctive, primal terror Natasha feels when confronted with the Hulk is not some overreaction from her cat brain. Rather it is the reasonable, sensible reaction of any thinking creature when faced with the Hulk, and Natasha is all too familiar with it. Familiar enough that she can handle it, familiar enough that she _will_ handle it, because a) that's her friend they're pointing those guns at, and b) they're going to get themselves killed for their trouble, which is maybe no more than they deserve, but Bruce would never forgive himself for it and he has enough ghosts haunting him.

And besides, Coulson is standing right next to those morons, and he's not allowed to die until she knows what's going on with him and Clint.

Small black boxes have been deployed around the doors to the lab, and that explains why the Hulk has been staying put instead of being half-way across the building by now. They're Bruce's own design, with a few tweaks from Tony, and emit at a frequency that human beings — or cats — can't hear, but that for the Hulk is like nails on a chalkboard. It won't stop him leaving if he really wants to get out, but they've been used successfully on missions before.

She pads out of the elevator, her body low to the ground, and stops next to Coulson, who's quietly talking into his comm with all the serenity of a man who's either unaware of the fact he's surrounded by a bunch of trigger-happy maniacs or entirely unconcerned by it.

The trigger-happy maniacs in question are markedly less trigger-happy now that there's a grown-up standing next to them, and their new-found restraint is probably not hurt by the fact that the Hulk's attention is now firmly focused on the man slowly walking towards him.

Clint is halfway across the lab, arms open, not a weapon in sight. His steps are slow and careful, and though she cannot make out his words, now that someone thought to turn off the alarm she can hear his voice — the soft, dulcet tones reserved for soothing a skittish cat or pacifying a terrifying beast bent on death and destruction.

"Easy does it, Barton." There's tension in every line of Coulson's body, but his voice is as she remembers it from the field — steady and measured and reassuringly familiar.

The Hulk is no longer bellowing, no longer threatening to bring the building down on them, but his is the stillness of a storm about to break, and Clint would not have been her first choice of an Avenger to send in — too human, too breakable, and not nearly fast enough to get away if that becomes the only option. She doubts he would have been Coulson's first choice either, but you do what you can with what you have and hope for the best.

For a moment it seems as though her misgivings are unfounded, however, because the Hulk seems to recognise Clint. He sniffs at the air and takes a step towards the archer, who holds very still and doesn't so much as flinch when the Hulk suddenly hurls a half destroyed chair against the wall. Clint doesn't move, but the lab tech still shaking in the corner yelps, and the Hulk growls, and the agents around Natasha shift in place and tighten their hands on their weapons. Coulson gestures for them to hold their fire and quietly asks if anyone is carrying tranquilisers.

"No, sir. It's not standard procedure with the Hulk. Tranquilising darts won't pierce the skin."

As opposed to bullets, which have proved such a resounding success in the past.

"Not for the Hulk. That man is about to lose it."

Yes, he is, and if he does all bets are off, but for the moment Clint has managed to get the Hulk's focus back on him and is carrying on a one-sided conversation with Banner's less than chatty alter ego. The Hulk tracks Clint's movements around the lab and slowly turns away from the terrified man in the lab coat, who looks as though he's about to pass out.

SHIELD employs some of the smartest, most brilliant scientists in the world, but panic makes even otherwise brilliant people do stupid things, and Natasha can almost see the moment the man decides that his best bet is to make a run for it. He waits until the Hulk has his back to him and bolts towards the door, almost tripping over his own feet in his haste to get out. The noise and sudden movement startle the Hulk, who spins around and roars at the man, cutting off his escape.

Clint, who's a dummy who jumps rope with the line between bravery and recklessness, shouts something, trying to get the Hulk's attention, and grabs his arm, which immediately proves to be the wrong thing to do when the Hulk shakes him off by hurling him at a wall. Hawkeye falls in a heap on the floor, unconscious, and all hell breaks loose. The STRIKE teams open fire despite Coulson's shouted warning to stand down, the Hulk rips a cupboard from the wall and throws it at them, and the man on the floor curls into a ball, shaking, too close to the middle of the lab to be safe from either the agitated Hulk or the friendly fire from the agents outside.

"Hold your fire!" Coulson repeats, trying to make himself heard over the commotion, but it's the small missile that flies over their heads and hits the wall at the end of the corridor that finally gets their attention.

"You heard the man." Stark's voice is slightly distorted by the armour's speakers and his boots clank on the stone floor. "Someone called the cavalry?"

The Hulk paces and growls and lashes out at what's left of the furniture inside the room, but for now the ultrasonic devices are still keeping him contained.

"You're standing down too, Iron Man." Tony is unimpressed by that, but impressing Tony Stark has never been high on Coulson's list of priorities. Iron Man can maybe take on the Hulk, but not without bringing down half the building on top of them. "Black Widow, you're up."

Natasha doesn't give herself time to think about it, does not give her cat brain time to catch up. There's only the mission. There's only the objective. There's only Coulson's steady, familiar voice in her ear.

 _Black Widow, you're up._

She patters towards the room, her feet light on the floor. The Hulk terrifies the part of her that's a cat, but he terrifies the part of her that's human too, and Natasha has never once let that get in her way.

A little fear is healthy. A little fear is good. It makes her faster and smarter and better. A little fear will keep her alive, and a little more will get her killed, and it's a fine line to walk between the two, but Natasha is a professional and she's usually sure of her footing. Kitty Nat might lack the certainty of the Black Widow, but they say cats always land on their feet, and she'll put that theory to the test if she has to.

The smoke is thicker in the lab itself, the smell of blood and chemicals stronger, but she ignores it as she ignores everything else. There's only so much a brain can take, and hers is full of the Hulk. And him she can handle.

She's pretty sure.

Clint is still lying unresponsive by the wall, and the man in the white coat is still shaking on the ground. Natasha jumps on a table and meows to get the Hulk's attention, despite how deeply unnatural and wrong it feels to her cat brain. Despite how deeply stupid it feels to her human one. Prey should not draw attention to itself.

It's loud in the lab — mostly because the Hulk is busy smashing several thousand dollars worth of top-of-the-line equipment — so it takes him a while to realise she's there, and when he finally does there's a moment when all reason flees her brain and she's left only with the acute terror of something small and breakable staring death in the face.

 _Not a cat. Not a cat. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. The Black Widow. Not a cat. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. Agent of SHIELD. The Black Widow._

 _The Black Widow._

 _The Black Widow._

Natasha holds her ground and retracts her claws and tries very hard to look small and fragile and non-threatening, which seeing as she is all those things shouldn't be all that hard, except that the instinct of her feline brain when faced with a predator twenty times her size is to lash out, which as instincts go is dumb and absurd and likely to get her killed.

She isn't a cat. She isn't a cat and her brain is her own, and she's not dying today. Not here. Not like this.

Natasha lets out a soft meow — hesitant and low and pleading — and the Hulk tilts his head to the side, looking confused.

 _Come on, big guy._

She takes a step towards the edge of the table and meows again, holding still when he stomps towards her, if for no other reason than to spite the part of her brain that wants to bolt. The Hulk lowers himself to a crouch so that his face is at the same level as Natasha and sniffs at her, still looking puzzled. Natasha moves closer to him, giving in to the instinct to sniff at him in turn. When her nose touches his face the Hulk jumps back, alarmed, causing her to do likewise.

After a second they edge closer to each other, resuming their mutual inspection, and there's something about it that soothes the part of her brain that's a cat, as if having established that he doesn't smell as green as he looks, she can now take her time finding out his position on ear rubs.

An enormous green hand comes up on the table, and he gently brushes her fur with a single finger, barely touching, as if afraid she'll break. Natasha lowers her head and sniffs at the finger once before licking it.

"Kitty," he huffs in a tone that's all amazement.

Natasha starts when he gets to his feet, both because of the suddenness of the movement and because for a moment she had forgotten to be scared, and seeing the Hulk drawn to his full height is a powerful reminder that she should be. His movements when he reaches for her are slow and hesitant and infinitely careful, and Natasha holds very still as the Hulk lifts her off the table.

"Kitty," he repeats, holding her lightly to his chest as he moves towards a corner of the room, where he plops down on the ground, legs outstretched in front of him. His fingers are feather-light where they touch her fur, and Natasha starts purring because she finds it soothing, and she hopes he does too.

From her current position she can see that Clint's eyes are open, and something like relief unfurls in her chest. Not that she had been worried. The only thing Hawkeye knows how to do better than shoot is fall. His eyes are locked on Dr-What's-His-Name, and he's slowly gesturing at him to stay down, and if the man screws it up for all of them a second time she has half a mind to let the Hulk use him for a squeeze toy.

She feels the exact moment the Hulk starts to slip away. His arms tighten slightly around her, as if he's afraid he'll drop her, and he lets out a soft sigh as his entire body shifts and changes, muscles rippling under the skin. It takes no more than a few seconds. One moment she's being held by the Hulk, the next Bruce Banner's arms go slack as he slumps limply to the floor.

The man in the lab coat, who up till then had been a paragon of bravery and stoicism, starts wailing loudly and immediately clings to the first person who reaches him, some poor woman from medical who better have some really powerful drugs in that bag of hers.

Two EMTs head straight for the second lab tech, who's still not regained consciousness, and a third one heads for Clint, who's as likely to let himself get checked out as he is to let Sam pilot the quinjet ( _"Oh, Sam, Sammy, Sammy. No. Just no." "I'm literally a licenced pilot. I used to work for the United States Air Force." "She's a delicate lady, Sam." "You used to be a carnie." "Can't let just anyone take her for a spin."_ ).

It's several moments before anyone comes to check on Bruce, because heaven forbids they should pay any mind to the world-class scientist and Avenger lying unconscious on the floor. When they finally do, Natasha finds herself hissing and growling at the two EMTs, like a mother cat defending her oversized, prone-to-anger-issues kitten. The two men, who had already looked loathe to approach Banner, don't seem any more inclined to do so now that he has her for a defender, and hover uncertainly at a safe distance.

"Romanov, let them do their job." Coulson walks past her and crouches down in front of Clint, who has already scared off at least three different EMTs, and those are the ones she noticed. "Barton," he says, his tone a little amused, "let them do their job."

"I'm fine, sir." He makes to get up, but Coulson places a hand on his shoulder and pushes him back down.

"Not a debate."

They stare at each other for several moments and Coulson does not move his hand away.

Clint is the first one to break eye contact.

"Fine."

Clint lets himself be dragged to medical, and Natasha allows the less than enthusiastic EMTs to get Bruce up on a gurney. She jumps on it and settles down on his chest, daring anyone to try and remove her. No one does.

They put him in a private room down in medical and do no more than check his vitals and leave at a speed that some might call undignified.

Personally, she calls it cowardly.

Bruce's skin is pale and clammy, and Natasha knows the exact moment he comes to, because he starts to shake. She moves closer to him and curls up on the curve of his neck, her head propped up on his chest. Displays of affection don't come easy to her — they never have — but Natasha the cat is far more tactile than Natasha the spider, and she finds that this comforts her too. Bruce's hand comes up and he buries his fingers in her fur, and the sound of her purring fills the room, like that of a small, soft engine.

"Did I—" His voice is husky and rough around the edges, and he clears his throat before trying again. "Did I hurt anyone?"

"Nah." Tony walks into the room and looks up from the tablet on his hand. "Well, you threw Barton against a wall, but who of us hasn't wanted to, on occasion?" He stops by the bed and looks Bruce up and down. "You look like you need fluids. Do you need fluids? Because I really want to be the one to tell the guy outside he needs to stick a needle in your arm."

"I'm fine." Bruce sits up on the bed, dislodging Natasha, who moves to his lap. He pets her absent-mindedly. "What happened?"

"There was an explosive device in one of the toys we got from that AIM facility. It didn't show up on the scanners. Crafty little rascals."

"Romanov," Coulson calls from the door. She jumps down from the bed and follows him outside, leaving Bruce and Tony to their discussion on how exactly AIM had managed to get the thing past both SHIELD and JARVIS.

The corridor outside is deserted apart from Coulson, who's waiting for her by the opposite wall. She looks up expectantly at him.

"Barton's not in his room." What a shocking plot twist. "I need you to find him."

Natasha tilts her head in surprise. Clint never stays in medical longer than it takes for someone to turn their back for half a minute. The only way to get him to stay put is to cuff him to the bed — which Coulson on occasion has — and that probably only works because Clint gets a kick out of it, because it's not as if he can't pick the lock. He once left with three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and enough sedatives to take down an elephant. The conventional wisdom is that if Barton is well enough to break out of medical, he's well enough. No one ever worries too much, and Coulson has certainly never once asked her to track him down on account of it, not even when she still had the steady nerves and opposable thumbs with which to accomplish the task.

Coulson reads enough into her silence that he feels compelled to elaborate.

"He was— upset. Before. Someone should make sure he's alright." Someone not named Phillip J. Coulson. Got it. "He hasn't left. He's still somewhere in the building."

Which means she knows exactly where to find him. She regards Coulson thoughtfully for another second before setting off for the door at the other end of the hall. Honestly, she's the most stable person in this entire team and she's a damn cat.


	6. Chapter 6

Hawkeye likes SHIELD's ventilation system for the same reason Kitty Nat likes the cat carrier — the vents are a small, dark space where he can hide and pretend no one can find him. Clint may talk at length about how they're such a great way to move around the building undetected, or wax poetic about the wonderful vantage point they provide from which to gather information, but mostly he likes having a place high off the ground where he can hide and sulk in peace.

It takes Natasha no more than ten minutes to find him, and it would have been faster if not for the fact that being fifteen inches tall and having paws for hands makes actually getting into the vents a bit more of a challenge than it would otherwise be.

It's almost completely dark in the confined space, but cats have no problems seeing in the dark, and Clint has no problems seeing anywhere.

"Go away," he says the moment she's close enough.

Natasha snorts. If he didn't want her to find him, he shouldn't have been moping exactly halfway between Coulson's office and the shooting range. Spies who can't spot their own patterns deserve what's coming to them.

She sits and looks down at him. Clint, who's lying on his back, tilts his head back to look at her, and they stare at each other for several moments.

And then she licks his forehead.

"Cut it out."

 _Yeah, no._

She does it again, a tongue like sandpaper, and Clint tries to swat her away and succeeds only in hitting himself in the face. Natasha snorts once more and licks his forehead in the exact same spot one last time, before stepping on him and lying down on his chest, despite his protests that he isn't a cat bed.

His hands come up on either side of her, and he buries his fingers in her fur, combing it lazily all the way from the top of her head down to her tail — the sort of automatic gesture that plays right into her cunning plan to lull him into a false sense of security by looking like a glorified stuffed animal. They stay silent for several minutes, the comfortable silence of people who know each other inside out, who've seen the good, the bad and the ugly, and have stuck around in spite of it.

"Coulson is stepping down as SHIELD liaison." He says it casually, like someone commenting on the weather, but she's lying right on top of him and he can't bluff his way around how tense he is. "He'll no longer be our handler, either. Mine or yours. Officially he's stepping down to focus on setting up a new team with May, but that's fucking bullshit."

There's no pretence of calm now, and the deep breath he takes makes her rise and fall, like a wave. He's quiet for several minutes.

"I fucked up, Tasha," he finally says, his voice soft and low, all fight gone out of it. "I kissed him." She lifts her head, surprised, and stares at him, but Clint doesn't meet her gaze. "It just— It seemed like a good idea at the time, you know? There was— I thought there was a moment. And I kissed him. And now everything's fucked up and it's all my fault."

These two morons had kissed each other and were now having the mother of all freak outs.

"It shouldn't be him," Clint continued. "If someone has to go, it should be me."

It doesn't even surprise her that Clint is blind to the fact Coulson has been in love with him for years — literally years — because Clint has never once believed he deserves a thing in his life: not her, not SHIELD, not his place in the Avengers. He's never once believed he could get anything he wanted, nor that he deserved anything enough to keep.

But what exactly is Coulson's damage that he doesn't see that Clint has been carrying a torch for him for the better part of forever? That Clint Barton, for all that he likes to pretend otherwise, hasn't looked at anyone else — _really_ looked at anyone else — since the day Agent Phillip Coulson of SHIELD showed up in his jail cell in the town of Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere, Arizona, and offered him a job?

Or maybe that's the problem right there, and it's so painfully obvious that she doesn't know how she didn't realise it before. Because of course Phil sees it. How could he not? He sees it and he would never do a thing about it, because he's exactly the sort of fool who would deny himself the things he wants out of a misguided sense of moral integrity.

He looks at Clint — who would take a bullet for him, who would literally cut off his right arm at a word from him — and sees that angry, loud-mouthed, self-destructive kid of so long ago, who didn't trust a living soul in the world but who had trusted _him_. He sees gratitude, and loyalty, and duty, and he would never do a thing to take advantage of that, or to abuse his position, or to break that trust, because he's Phil Coulson, and he might be an idiot, but he's a principled idiot.

And here they both are, miserable and getting on her nerves — all because one's an insecure, emotionally-crippled mess, and the other's an overly-noble, self-sacrificing fool, and they're both idiots who can't see past their own hang-ups.

Honestly, she's more well-adjusted than this and she was raised by sociopaths.

Natasha's only half-paying attention to Clint's litany about ex-carnie screw-ups who don't belong in the same team as Captain-I-Punched-Hitler-America anyway, and how it would be better for everyone if he just quit while he was ahead, and then Coulson wouldn't have to step down and the only person Clint would have screwed over would have been himself, and well, he is used to that.

She isn't the most sympathetic of audiences at the best of times, and right now she doesn't have the time to spend on Clint's little pity party.

No one's quitting. She's not letting anyone quit. Clint and Phil are hers, and she's not losing one to keep the other, and certainly not for so foolish a reason as them being in unrequited love with one another.

And if that puts her in the same league as Tony-I-Build-Luxury-Apartments-For-My-Friends-So-They-Won't-Leave-Me-Stark, so be it.

She can fix this.

Despite what Coulson told Clint, Natasha knows for a fact that Fury hasn't signed off on him stepping down, but she also knows that the Director will change his tune as soon as he sees an angle he likes, and that Coulson's easy affability hides the sort of steady determination able to move mountains. However long it takes him, he'll get Fury to agree in the end, and he'll get the Avengers to accept whoever he hand-picks as his successor, and none of that suits Natasha in the slightest.

No. What she needs is to get ahead of this disaster, and she knows exactly how.

First she finds Hill, because Natasha collects favours like some people collect stamps, and Maria owes her a no questions asked. She owes her a no questions asked the size of the fucking world.

"You want me to do what now?" Maria Hill's office is ten times the size of Coulson's, all of it dark tones and shiny surfaces, the better to get rid of blood stains.

 _You heard me._

"Yeah, no, I don't think I did. Because first of all, that's not how you spell 'liaison', and second of all, it seems to me that you want me to replace Coulson with Victoria Hand, and I know you can't possibly have said that, because according to your last psych eval you haven't gone off the deep end just yet."

 _It will be fine. Don't you trust me?_

"I trust that if you had gone rogue and wanted to bring down the Avengers, you'd find a less messy way to do it than to make them answerable to Hand, but that's the extent of it. What's your play?"

 _Henry V, with a little Much Ado thrown in._

"Funny. The question wasn't rhetorical. You need to give me something."

 _No, I don't. You owe me._

"Not this much, I don't."

 _Budapest, Maria._

Hill opens her mouth to reply and then closes it again, because she does owe her this much, and much more besides.

"Fury already turned down Coulson's transfer request," she finally says, and if they've moved on from what a horrible idea this is to how much Fury wouldn't approve, Natasha knows she has her. Hill isn't afraid of Fury, and she's very seldom inclined to pretend otherwise.

 _Fury is in deep cover in South America. No one can contact him. It's your show._

"Yeah, and he makes it my show because he trusts me not to burn the agency to the ground in his absence." Maria leans her head back against the chair and stares at the ceiling for a few seconds. "You know what you're doing?" she asks at last, looking down at Natasha, who's sitting on her desk.

 _Of course._

"Fine. Consider it done. Now get out of my office. And Natasha," Hill adds before Natasha's out of the room. "Don't overplay your hand."

She never has yet.

Victoria Hand is a smart, experienced, capable agent, and Natasha could not have picked a worse person to handle the Avengers if she had built her in a lab.

The very qualities that make Hand a good operative make her wholly inadequate to deal with the collection of hot tempers, ego, paranoia and mistrust of authority that make up the Avengers. She is solid, hard as nails, but also unyielding, inflexible, unwilling to bend even if she knew how to — and she doesn't. She was CIA before she became SHIELD, and Army Rangers before that, and while a similar career path gave Coulson patience and nuance and the breadth of experience needed for the job, it gave her a will like iron. She believes in discipline, in respecting the chain of command and in following orders to the letter, and she expects her own orders to be followed to the letter — promptly, efficiently and without question, without a debate, without having to provide a list of reasons that might or might not suit Tony's mood or Cap's scruples.

The team would never have been happy to lose Coulson — Coulson's one of them, he's theirs, and SHIELD can't have him back — but given enough time to lay down the groundwork and find someone suitable, Coulson could have brought it about, could have brought them all around.

There's no amount of time, no amount of preparation, that would have made Victoria Hand a palatable choice, and Natasha's very proud of the neat powder keg she's fashioned for herself.

It doesn't take very long for the cracks to start to appear, and they're small at first — the Falcon missing a rendezvous, Scarlet Witch straying slightly from mission parameters — but it isn't long before their special brand of organised chaos snowballs into actual chaos, and the tighter the leash Hand keeps them on, the more they lash out — at her, at SHIELD, at each other. Small disagreements escalate into full blown arguments, and everyone's always one wrong look away from a temper tantrum or a shouting match or a fight.

There's the time Tony gets tired of arguing with Hand and "accidentally" switches all their comms to a private frequency in the middle of a mission ( _"Well, that's weird and not at all intentional. Must have been an equipment malfunction. JARVIS, remind me to look into it." "Certainly, sir."_ ).

There's the time Sam and Rhodes almost come to blows during a debrief. ( _"Did they let you pick what orders to follow when you were in the Air Force, Sergeant?" "Fuck off, Rhodes." "'Cause in my day they taught us to respect our superior officers." "Oh, I'm sorry. Fuck off, Colonel."_ )

There's the time one of Clint's arrows misses Hand's head by an inch. ( _"My bad. Totally did not mean to do that." "Barton, if you're done fucking around, perhaps I can draw your attention to the giant lizard destroying the building to your left." "So that's what that is. On it, ma'am.")_

They're disorganised, argumentative and sloppy, and the only thing keeping them functional is Steve, who'd keep that team together with his bare hands if he had to.

Coulson is not happy.

"I don't know what possessed you to appoint Hand to the position, but you have to see this isn't working." His voice is steady and even, but the nervous energy radiating off him is like a physical presence in the room with them.

"It's an adjustment period," Hill says with a shrug, looking up from her screen. "Things will settle down."

"They're tearing each other apart, Maria."

" _They_ are not your concern anymore, Phil. You were the one who wanted to step down."

"I should have been at least consulted in the choice of my replacement."

Hill chuckles. "That's not how this works, and you should know that. Now please leave. I am swamped with work. I trust I'll have your latest report on the Tajikistan incident on my desk by the afternoon."

Coulson does not roll his eyes — Natasha has never once seen him roll his eyes while on duty — but it's a close thing.

"Of course," he says only, with the blank face of a man who has a lot he'd like to say on the subject of Tajikistan, and pointless reports, and deputy directors who refuse to listen to reason.

"Romanov, a word." Hill waits until Coulson is out of the room, and then her expression darkens. "Still think you know what you're doing?"

 _It's under control._

"It better be. And you might want to drop a hint to Barton to cool it, because he's this close to a disciplinary hearing. Stark can pull whatever crap he likes, but Barton is a SHIELD agent, and superhero or not, I will not put up with insubordination."

 _It's an adjustment period._

Hill, who doesn't share Coulson's prejudices against making use of a wide range of facial expressions, rolls her eyes and dismisses Natasha with a warning that Budapest only buys her so much leeway.

Clint has been acting out, which is no more than Natasha would have expected. He and Hand have always had a fraught relationship — Clint doesn't do well with authority, and Hand doesn't do well with assets who talk back and refuse to learn their place — but it is more than that. Clint has been running one-off missions with every single senior handler in the agency, including Hand, for months. He can play nice when he wants to. It's only that now he most decidedly does not want to.

It's _Clint Barton: The Troubled Years_ all over again. He's being difficult, belligerent, cocky and an all-around pain in the ass, and part of it is him punishing Hand for not being Coulson, and most of it is him punishing himself for fucking up the one good thing in his life, and sooner or later Hand will run out of patience and bench him.

But everything's under control.

Coulson does not speak the entire way home. He's still stuck babysitting her, because Natasha's been through a traumatic event and is in a delicate state and can't possibly deal with any more drastic changes in her life, so his little project with May will just have to wait until such time as the Black Widow is back in human form. ( _"Think of it as a chance to catch up on paperwork. Should give you plenty of time to finalise your handover reports." "Yes, ma'am."_ )

What it does give him is plenty of time to fret, to go over all the logs and footage and reports from the missions the Avengers have been running under Hand. Coulson has been keeping his distance, wanting to make sure they all have time to acclimatize, but he's been following everything that has been happening from a distance, and it has been eating away at him. He doesn't say a word about it, and keeps all of his unease to himself, but there's no more Project Runway and ice cream after dinner, only reports all over the coffee table and grainy mission footage on the TV screen.

Tonight there isn't even that.

It wasn't a good day. A very small man in a very big robot tried to destroy the Village, and the Avengers were sent out to handle it, which they did, but Clint almost got himself killed when he jumped off a roof — against orders — and onto the creature, which caused Hand to yell at him, which caused Tony to yell at her, which caused Cap to yell at everyone to cut it out and stop making a scene.

The whole thing is up on YouTube.

Coulson warms up some leftover lasagna and sets it up for Natasha on the kitchen island. He picks up his phone yet again, only to change his mind — yet again. He puts it away.

"I'm going to take a shower and then go to bed. Turn off the lights when you're done."

Natasha watches him disappear into the bathroom and waits until she can hear water running, and then jumps down to the floor and makes her way to the study, where there's still a landline, because Coulson is secretly ninety years old.

It's time for phase two.

The phone rings twice before JARVIS picks up.

"Good evening, Agent Romanov. How can I help?"

 _Get me Barnes._


	7. Chapter 7

It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are quiet days. No one tries to destroy New York or take over the world on Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, evil takes a break. As a result of this well-established fact, Coulson tends to leave the office early on Tuesdays, even if — and in fact, specially if — Hill happens to be on a crusade about late reports.

"It's been three years, Maria."

"I don't know what to tell you, Phil. Accidentally bringing down governments involves a lot of paperwork. Had it been deliberate you'd have been done by now."

"How about you just tell me what it is I did that you're punishing me for, and I'll say sorry and promise not to do it again?"

But it isn't about Coulson, and Natasha knows it even if Hill won't say it. She knows misdirected rage when she sees it, and this is a textbook case. Hill isn't mad at Coulson about something _he_ did. She's mad at Coulson because his two whelps from hell are being a gigantic pain in her ass.

Clint is still doing his level best to get Hand to shoot him with his own bow — which sooner or later she is sure to do — and Fury is no longer incommunicado so he's bound to have heard about what's being going on in his absence, which if Natasha knows Fury — and she does — must have led to a rather colourful and very loud conversation, punctuated by an inordinate large amount of expletives.

And while Hill makes no decisions she's not prepared to back one hundred percent, the fact remains that much like Coulson could have done without having to file yet another report on the Tajikistan incident, Hill could probably have done without a conversation that must of necessity have involved the rough equivalent of "Romanov made me do it."

And who can blame her, really?

Unfortunately for Maria, there's not much she can do to take out her frustrations on those who so rightfully deserve it — Clint is already having his ass handed to him on a daily basis by Victoria Hand, and Natasha can't hold a pen — so that leaves Coulson, who's really to blame for all of this because he never taught his assets proper respect for their betters, and now Maria is the one stuck dealing with this nonsense.

So yeah. Tajikistan. Whelps from hell. Tuesday.

They drive straight home instead of stopping for groceries, because Phil Coulson has all the domestic instincts of a Chitauri, and if there's still instant noodles somewhere in the house, why would anyone bother with grocery shopping?

It's already dark out, and as they walk up the stairs Natasha can hear noise coming from the different apartments — loud music, someone laughing, Pablo the dog getting overly excited about something. (Something cat-shaped and right outside his door, no doubt. Natasha answers the challenge with a low, steady growl.)

The burnt out light bulb on Coulson's floor still hasn't been changed, because the super has the same relaxed attitude towards building maintenance that Coulson has towards restocking his fridge, so half the corridor is cast in darkness. Coulson takes his key out of his pocket, and is about to open the door when he stops the movement just before the key touches the lock.

The quality of the door is much like the quality of the lock, which means Coulson doesn't need her enhanced senses to hear the muffled voices, or the soft clang of something metal hitting the floor. He quietly puts her down and reaches for his gun, silently opening the door with his other hand. Natasha pushes out of the cat carrier and follows him into the apartment.

It smells of chocolate and fried garlic and tomato sauce, and Coulson must think it unlikely that burglars would stop their criminal activities long enough to cook dinner, because he lowers his gun slightly, and then all the way once he reaches the kitchen door.

"Is there a particular reason why you're breaking and entering?"

"Technically, _he_ 's breaking and entering." Sam slings a kitchen towel over his shoulder and points at Bucky Barnes, who's hunched over the kitchen island, flipping through an old Captain America comic book. " _I_ 'm making dinner."

"Why are you making dinner in my kitchen?"

Sam shrugs. "The Winter Soldier tells me to make pasta, I ask him to point me towards the nearest pan, you know what I'm saying?"

"I really don't."

"Hand was in our kitchen." Bucky doesn't look up from the book. "We're hiding here."

"Hiding might be a bit strong. It's more of a strategic retreat."

"Meaning must've changed since the forties," Barnes mutters, turning the page.

Coulson stares at them for several moments, his expression blank and unreadable. Sam bears the scrutiny with all the equanimity of a man who regularly trusts a pair of flimsy, military-issue wings to stop him from going splat on the ground from a height of five thousand feet. Barnes carries on reading the comic book with all the equanimity of a man who probably knows ten different ways to kill someone with said comic book.

"Yeah, alright," Coulson finally says, holstering his gun. "Are those brownies?"

Sam smiles, grabbing the plate and holding it towards Coulson. "Bribery brownies. My grandma's recipe."

Coulson takes one, and then — because he's a man who knows no fear — grabs the comic book away from Barnes and hits him lightly over the head with it.

"No collectibles in the kitchen. House rules."

James Buchanan Barnes — World War II veteran, century-old former Hydra assassin, _the Winter Soldier_ — blinks at him in confusion, his right hand still slightly raised where it had been holding a page.

"Yes, sir," he finally says, taking the book back and making towards the living room. Natasha follows him.

"How did you even get in?" she hears Coulson asking Sam.

"Hate to break it to you, man, but Natasha could pick that lock and she has tiny kitty paws."

She jumps on the couch and walks along the back, sitting just above Barnes, who's half lying down with the book open in front of him.

"Not that I need to," he says in Russian without looking at her, "but I don't get the plan."

She can't tap her reply on the upholstery — both because it would be useless and because Coulson would literally murder her with her own claws if they came anywhere close his precious couch — but luckily for her, she doesn't need to. She has visual aids.

She balances on her hind legs and points at one of the framed posters on the wall. Barnes glances briefly at the _Field of Dreams_ poster before returning his attention to the comic book.

"I don't understand that reference," he says in English.

* * *

It's a nice, relaxed evening, and some of the tension Coulson has been carrying around for the past week seems to leave him as he and Sam heatedly debate the relative merits of the Mets vs the Yankees with the sort of good-natured intensity that in any two less easy-going people would have resulted in bloodshed. To hear either man tell it, the other one is an unnatural degenerate who doesn't know the first thing about baseball.

When appealed to for support, Bucky simply shrugs, but Natasha can hear him mutter something about the Brooklyn Dodgers under his breath as he grabs a beer from the fridge.

That dinner starts a trend, as if once Sam and Bucky established that Coulson doesn't have any very strong feelings about having his home broken into by random Avengers (and an intern named Jeremy), they wasted no time in spreading that information to the others. Coulson doesn't question the fact that everyone suddenly seems to know his home address, and Natasha does not volunteer an explanation as to how that might have happened. (It's certainly nothing _she_ did with the help of a sentient AI with no sense of personal boundaries, and a bored, former Soviet assassin, and Coulson can't prove any differently.)

It starts small — one time they come home to find Wanda and Bucky on the couch watching _Princess Bride_ ; one time Thor and Sam show up with beer and chicken wings.

Bruce knocks on the door late one night, and it transpires that he had actually arrived several hours earlier, but being either unwilling or unable to pick the lock had resigned himself to waiting outside, only to be discovered by Mrs Burke from across the hall, who then proceeded to kidnap the good doctor and feed him cake and tea for three hours while bombarding him with stories about Pablo, the terrible Jack Russel her daughter Annie had decided made for a suitable substitute for a grandchild, and did Doctor Banner think that right?

Tony drops by before long, complaining bitterly about having to drag himself to Queens — QUEENS — and did they know he has a perfectly good tower where they can all hang out and be waited on by an army of bots and a super-intelligent AI that regulates every last thing to their particular specifications? And if Thor could stop hogging all the chow mein, that'd be great. People whose little brothers go around turning other people into house cats don't deserve chow mein.

"Loki has sworn most faithfully he had nought to do with this unfortunate event."

"God of mischief and lies," Sam coughs none too subtly, and Thor's face falls, prompting Jane to pat his arm sympathetically.

"We haven't established it was Asgardian magic," she says, accepting a napkin from Coulson. "The energy signatures were inconclusive."

Tony rolls his eyes and gestures dramatically at Wanda, who's curled up in a corner of the couch with Natasha on her lap.

"Wanda?" he asks in the tone of a man who's tired of arguing with philistines.

"It's Asgardian." Her fingers don't pause their movement along Natasha's fur, and the Black Widow has long ago accepted the fact that petting of any sort tends to reduce her to a small purring machine. She's made her peace with that.

Bruce frowns. "Strange didn't seem convinced it was. Said something about consulting with the Masters of the Mystic Arts and testing out some theories in the Mirror Dimension."

"Stephen is a very capable sorcerer," Wanda acknowledges.

"But?"

"But he likes to unnecessarily complicate things." She lifts Natasha, holding her so they're looking at each other, and laughs a little when Natasha licks at her nose. "It's a glamour," she says, setting Natasha down again, one arm wrapped around her. "It's a good glamour, but it's a glamour. We should have been able to undo it. _I_ should have been able to undo it."

"It does not follow that it must be Asgardian," Thor insists. "The Nine Realms are a vast place, home to many powerful races."

No doubt, but not so many that would get a kick out of something that might be rather devious, but is also largely inconsequential — something even Natasha must admit, even if it certainly does not feel inconsequential to _her_.

It's the sort of petty malice that requires not just power, but also a personal grudge and a penchant for mischief, and the list of suspects is not so long that one particular name doesn't immediately stand out. No one seems terribly eager to press the issue when Thor has the hurt look of a kicked puppy, however, and the conversation turns to the safer topic of how best to drop Victoria Hand into a deep, dark hole and make it look like an accident.

"Hand is an extremely experienced handler," Coulson says, sitting on the floor next to Bucky.

"Hand is a bully and a fiend, and people who abandoned us don't get to comment."

"Stark, you're sitting on my chair, eating my food. How abandoned can you possibly be feeling?"

"Fine. People who force me to watch _The Real Housewives of New Jersey_ in what was a poor excuse for a TV set even when it was new — which I'm guessing must've been sometime during the Eisenhower administration — don't get to comment."

"Come, Tony, this is a most excellent moving picture device and I will not hear it decried."

Thor has very strict views on the duties of a guest in honouring the hospitality of his host.

Tony has none at all.

The next day, Coulson and Natasha come home to discover that the sensible and perfectly serviceable television has been replaced by an expensive-looking, state-of-the-art smart TV and home entertainment system. Coulson turns and stares at his door as if it personally betrayed him.

There are nights when it's just Sam and Coulson watching a baseball game on TV, and nights when Bruce shows up with a chess set. On days when the Avengers are called out on a mission, many of them drop by in the evening. On really bad days, all of them do — tired and frustrated and looking to vent — and Natasha could almost pat herself on the back for a job well done.

By the end of this she will have wrapped them around each other so tightly that there will never again be any question of someone else being put in charge of the Avengers.

There are only two fish currently evading her hook, and if one comes as a bit of a surprise, the other one really doesn't. Clint was always going to be a problem, and Natasha did not kid herself into thinking otherwise, but he's a problem that can wait (even if Phil's face falls every time someone breaks in, or knocks on the door, or shows up unannounced and it turns out not to be Clint).

Clint is an Avenger. He's not going anywhere, even if wishes he could — even _when_ he wishes he could. Her primary objective is — and has to be — to keep Coulson on the team, to tie them all up in such a way that not even Fury, not even Hand, not even Coulson himself would think to break those bonds. The rest will follow.

No, Clint keeping his distance does not surprise her. Steve keeping his, however, does, though maybe it shouldn't have. Steve might not be exactly the poster-boy soldier many would have him be — the sort who mindlessly follows orders and always starts the day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance — but his sense of duty, his sense of service, is almost as deep as Coulson's and twice as old. He's led the team almost from the start, and the weight of that responsibility is something he carries with him always. He might not like Hand any better than the rest of them, but he won't undermine her by running to Coulson — because she's their designated liaison, because it would simply serve to further destabilise the team, because whatever his personal opinion of her, she's good at what she does.

Of course, Natasha's scaredy cat routine around the time she first sprouted cat ears probably hasn't helped the situation either. Steve's the sort of guy who'll respect someone's need for space past the point of all reasonableness. He's the only person on the team with any sense of personal boundaries, and he has them for the whole lot of them.

It's fine. She's done more with less. She doesn't, strictly speaking, need all the Avengers on the verge of a coup — just enough of them. Though having said that, Steve _is_ the team leader.

And really, the least Natasha can do after Phil took her in is to get him the full set.

She's still working out the best solution to her little problem when the circumstances kind of solve it for her. Because sometimes all you need is a little luck and for the right wanna-be villain to destroy half of Midtown during rush hour.

It's a disaster of an op from the get-go. There's simply too many people — on the office buildings around them, out on the streets, up on rooftops filming what's going on instead of running for cover. SHIELD is too slow setting up a perimeter, the NYPD is too slow evacuating, and Hand is too ineffective in defusing the growing frustration of the team, forced to sit on their hands while giant beetles swarm out of the sewers and oversized wasps appear out of nowhere.

At first the insects are not really doing much of anything, but then a hot dog vendor throws a rock at a giant ant, and it immediately charges at him, which is all the motivation Tony needs to set it on fire. And then all hell breaks loose. It's as if someone flipped a switch and all the insects turn hostile — attacking people, chomping on cars, chipping away at buildings. The Avengers jump into the fray despite Hand's orders to stand down, and the day ends with eleven dead civilians, countless injuries and thousands of dollars in property damage.

Natasha isn't in the room during the debrief, and neither is Coulson, but nothing travels faster inside SHIELD than gossip, and news of the shouting match between Victoria Hand and Captain America are not long in reaching them, particularly because Sitwell had started a new office pool on what exactly it would take to get Steve Rogers to go ballistic at Hand, and Jeremy had been the only person to put money down on giant bugs. ( _"That kid has potential, Phil. I did not think he did, but that kid has potential."_ )

They all drop by the apartment in the evening, one by one — first Bruce, who's still looking far too pale, then Wanda, whose eyes are suspiciously red, then all the rest until Coulson's small living room is packed full of Avengers looking tired and dejected.

There's no chatter, none of the usual good-natured banter. Coulson makes them all toast and scrambled eggs with a side of bacon — because Jeremy's gone shopping, and there's something comforting about breakfast for dinner — and they eat in a silence interrupted only by the soft background noise of the TV. When the programming switches to the news and images of crumbling skyscrapers and fleeing people appear on the screen, Tony startles them all by throwing the remote at the television, and only Wanda's quick reflexes stop it from cracking the screen.

For a moment no one says anything, no one so much as moves a muscle. The remote is still hovering in mid-air in front of the TV, and Tony is still looking like a man who badly needs to break something. And then his shoulders sag, and Bruce pours him another cup of tea, and Wanda guides the remote back to the coffee table.

Natasha jumps down from the couch and crosses the room, rubbing against Tony's leg until he picks her up. She wants them on the verge of a coup, not to actually stage one. Human beings derive comfort from physical contact, so she makes herself comfortable in his lap, and nuzzles his hand until he starts petting her.

Someone rings the bell and Natasha can almost see the hope in Coulson's face — Clint hasn't been seen since the debrief, and going by the way Coulson has been checking his phone, he hasn't been returning his calls either. When he opens the door, however, it's Barnes on the other side. Barnes by himself, which means Steve is still being stubborn. Damn the man and his principles. Everyone else has the good sense to let her manipulate them. Why can't he?

Barnes stops behind Sam's chair and looks at her.

"Maybe what we need," he says in Russian, "is a little less _Field of Dreams_ , and a little more _Dunkirk_."

Yeah, alright. This strategy has yielded all the results it's going to. Sometimes it's enough to cast a net; sometimes you have to work a little harder to reel people in. She jumps down from Tony's lap and walks over to Barnes, who opens the cat carrier for her to get in.

"Where are you two going?" Coulson asks, suddenly suspicious.

"Brooklyn."


	8. Chapter 8

The thing about looking like a cat is that people tend to treat her like one, even if they know better. Even _when_ they know better. They look at her and see big eyes, and soft, inviting fur. They touch easily and speak freely and forget all too quickly who she really is, and the longer she remains like this, the worse it will get. But Barnes is different. He doesn't coo, doesn't touch, does not forget for a moment who and what she is. The Winter Soldier hides behind his eyes always, and he never forgets that behind hers is the Black Widow — all sharp edges and deadly accuracy.

Even if she currently looks like a stuffed animal.

Bucky doesn't buy into the whole cute and cuddly thing, but she's banking on the fact that Steve does.

Barnes takes her to a small boxing gym in a quiet side-street somewhere in Brooklyn. It's after hours, so the place is mostly dark and there doesn't seem to be anyone around, but Natasha can see a light once they're in the lobby, and hear sounds coming from deeper inside the building.

Her companion falls behind and melts into the shadows, and Natasha follows the sound until she comes to a large room that's mostly taken up by a boxing ring. Punching bags hang from the ceiling along the far side, and Steve is all the way in the corner, beating an innocent punching bag into submission before an audience of discarded bags that have outlived their usefulness and now lie in a sad little pile surrounded by spilt sand.

The gym at the Tower is equipped with reinforced bags, but sometimes Steve just needs to hit something that will break. He can't hit Hand, and he can't hit Fury, and he's done as much violence as he could to the army of vermin that took out eleven people on his watch, so he's here, in Brooklyn, working out his frustrations on innocent, non-Tony-enhanced punching bags.

Natasha waits for the inevitable moment when the bag goes flying through the air, a trail of sand in its wake, and then pads towards Steve, rubbing against his legs to get his attention. Rogers starts and looks down, surprised.

"Hey, buddy," he says, leaning down to pick her up. "How did you get in here?" He holds her to his chest, scratching the top of her head and behind her ear before frowning slightly and looking at her more closely. "Natasha?" he asks, and she catches a finger between her teeth by way of reply. "How on earth did you get here?" Steve glances towards the entrance and must catch a glimpse of Bucky, because he chuckles and shakes his head. "He always was a worrywart."

Carrying her in his arms, Steve sits down in one of the benches set against the wall. "I'm sorry we still haven't been able to turn you back. Everything's been crazy lately, but that's no excuse. We should look after our own."

His fingers are firm and slightly calloused where they comb through her fur, and Natasha leans on her side and paws at the arm he has wrapped around her. Steve chuckles.

"When I was a boy," he says, a smile in his voice, "there was a cat that used to come around to the apartment and sit on the fire escape making a nuisance of himself until my ma let him in and fed him a scrap of something or other. I saw right through him then, and I see right through you now. Whatever you're scheming, you should stop."

That's a lot of petting from a man who 'sees right through her'.

"Coulson wanted to step down," he continues. "It's not fair to him to make him feel guilty about it. It's not fair to Hand, either. She's still getting used to the job, we're still getting used to her… It's an adjustment. So I'm sorry you missed your trip, but whatever game you and Bucky have going on, I'm not playing."

Which as intentions go is certainly an honourable one, except that when he tries to find Bucky to take her home, Barnes is nowhere to be found. That's as much of a surprise to Natasha as it is to Steve, but she can appreciate a flash of inspiration when she sees one, and Barnes was always quick on his feet. Now Steve has no choice but to take her back to Coulson's, because it's not as if she can possibly take herself, and what else is she to do?

Barnes — who always thinks two steps ahead and who's almost as ruthlessly cold-blooded as she is — took the cat carrier with him, which might have been no more than a minor inconvenience, except that Steve drives a motorcycle, and faced with the question of how best to carry her, simply decides to tuck her under his jacket.

Maybe the cats that roamed the streets of 1940s Brooklyn and conned food out of gullible single mothers were uncommonly hardy creatures, impervious to the weather and with nerves of steel.

It's fiendishly cold and everything is moving too fast and the whole world is entirely too loud, and Natasha can do no more than shake and meow and try to remember that cutting Steve's chest to ribbons would probably only result in them crashing, which would be terrible, except that at least then the damn bike would come to a halt, and now _there_ 's a thought.

By the time they reach Coulson's street, she's been reduced to a whimpering mess, which would be embarrassing if she had it in her to feel anything but abject terror. She's too terrified even to give in to the instinct to flee. Steve has by then realised his mistake and is whispering soothing nothings to her as he walks towards the building, arms wrapped tightly around her.

The second they're inside the apartment, everyone crowds around them, demanding to know what happened. Natasha's nerves are shot, and there's just too many of them — all of them loud and alien and frightening — and she badly wants to run and hide, except that she can't move and she can't stop shaking and she can't stop crying — soft, plaintive, pathetic little whimpers that only make her feel worse, but she _just can't stop_.

Strong, familiar hands take her from Steve, and she clings to Coulson, latching on to his scent, to his voice, to the feeling of him. The rational, human part of her brain is drowning in a sea of panic, but he's gotten her through worse and she would know him anywhere.

"Doctor," he says, "perhaps it might be better if you were to tend to those scratches. There's a first-aid kit in the bathroom."

"I'm fine," Steve says, despite looking almost as shaken up as Natasha. "Don't worry about me."

"Come on, Steve. Let me take a look."

"Sergeant, there's a hot water bottle in a cupboard somewhere. If you could—"

"I'm on it."

One by one, Coulson gets them all to back off and give her some space, and Natasha slowly calms down until the only evidence of her little meltdown is the way she's still clinging to Coulson, who's settled down with her on the armchair by the window. The solid reality of him and the soft pressure of his fingers along her side is doing more to warm her up than the hot water bottle he tucked under her. Everyone else is sitting close by, speaking softly to each other as if afraid to startle her.

"Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that Cap's driving skills freaked her out more than the Hulk?"

Bruce gives Tony a look and pats a downcast Steve sympathetically on the shoulder. Cap is looking a little ashen and very guilty, his fingers almost white around the mug of tea Bucky pushed at him.

Barnes is sitting on the floor across from her, his back against the wall. His hands are crossed over his raised knee, his index finger moving rapidly up and down, almost like a nervous tic. Almost.

 _One to go._

Natasha yawns and snuggles more comfortably against Coulson. God, but it's been an exhausting day.

* * *

Steve comes by a lot after that — even more so than Sam, who's developed a sudden and unexpected interest in _Project Runway_ ; even more so than Bucky, who's tasked with shepherding everyone else. Guilt has its uses.

At first Steve and Coulson are at pains to keep the conversation away from SHIELD, and Hand, and the team, but that doesn't last longer than the time it takes for the Avengers to be called in again, this time to deal with a giant squid in the Hudson.

"If she'd only listen," Steve complains after the debrief, slumping down on the couch in Coulson's office. Catching himself, he hastens to add, "Not that she isn't an excellent handler."

"Salt of the earth," Sam says, deadpan.

"She's very experienced," Coulson agrees.

"She's a pain in the ass and we should have fed her to the squid." Tony doesn't do diplomatic unless Pepper makes him, and Pepper is not in the room.

Natasha might almost feel bad for her part in all of this, except that they're exactly where she wants them and she really doesn't.

Everyone's safely caught in her carefully-spun web except for Clint, who never had the good sense to just let her help him help himself. Natasha isn't worried, though. The trick with Clint is to give him just enough rope to hang himself. The more isolated he feels, the more he tends to isolate himself, the more he turns into a tight bundle of snark, attitude and self-loathing, and sooner or later he's bound to snap.

The moment, when it comes, is not during an Avengers mission, but during a joint SHIELD-CIA op in the Czech Republic. The mission parameters are simple: to take down a man by the name of Amon Garcia, who has his fingers in many pies of the weapon-dealing, alien-tech re-purposing, human-trafficking, dictatorship-propping variety. Garcia has spent the better part of a decade frustrating the efforts of law-enforcement agencies to bring him in. He's too wealthy, too well-connected, with an army of lawyers large enough to populate a small country. Unfortunately for him, though, some of the alphabet agencies are markedly less distressed than others at the thought of putting a bullet in someone's brain, provided they've done enough to deserve it.

Enter SHIELD and the CIA, and the merry task force they've assembled to bring it about. The different American intelligence agencies have a relationship that might very generously be described as tempestuous, and perhaps more accurately described as unstable, unmanageable and prone to outbursts of violence and backstabbing that put Natasha in mind of the backstage at the Bolshoi. SHIELD finds the CIA lacking. The CIA finds SHIELD uppity. No one likes the NSA. When forced to work together, they invariably spend half the time trying to sabotage each other, and the other half trying to one-up each other. It's all very dignified.

That's how an Avenger ends up on a task force put together to bring down a two-bit thug. The CIA has many excellent people in its ranks — agents who are competent, capable, disciplined, well-trained — and it would never occur to Nick Fury to imply otherwise (specially when he spends so much time poaching them), but SHIELD has Clint Barton, Hawkeye, the best marksman in the whole wide world. Go ahead and top that, CIA.

It's nighttime in Prague when the specialists take their positions up on the rooftops around the hotel where Garcia is staying. Three of them have the target in their sights: Clint, Kamala Acker from SHIELD and John Quincy from the CIA.

"Hawkeye, do you have the shot?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Take it."

Clint hesitates. "Ma'am, there are two minors in the room. Approximately seven-year old male and ten-year old female."

"Can you make the shot without endangering them?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then take the shot, Hawkeye."

And once upon a time, a different Clint might have taken that shot — a Clint who was younger and eager to prove himself, and more inclined to play ball. But this Clint is older and annoyed, and determined to be difficult, specially when it comes to obeying bullshit orders.

"My weapon seems to be malfunctioning, ma'am."

Hand does not sigh on the open comm, but it's a near thing.

"Acker, do you have the shot?"

"No, ma'am." And that might or might not be true. Most SHIELD agents like Clint well enough, but the other snipers positively worship him.

"Quincy, do you have it?" And that's Richard Whitehall on the comms, the CIA handler.

"Yes, sir."

"Take him down."

"Yes, sir."

And Quincy might have done it, but the precise second he fires, the barrel of his rifle is knocked to the side by a shot from two rooftops away.

"Motherfucking cunt," he hisses.

"Ma'am, I think my weapon is working again."

"The room's gone dark," Acker says. "We no longer have the target."

The moment they all reach the extraction point, Quincy tries to take a swing at Clint, which is a dumb thing to do, because Clint is a former carnie turned thief, turned assassin, turned SHIELD agent, turned Avenger, who regularly spars with Captain America and the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow.

Instead of letting Quincy get a punch in, Clint blocks it and proceeds to demonstrate in excruciating detail just how pathetically outclassed the other man is, which might have been incredibly satisfying, but was also extremely dumb, because Clint's in enough hot water as it is, and Hand's reached the end of her rope when it comes to dealing with the cocky, smug, undisciplined, poor excuse of a specialist Coulson saddled her with when he decided being in charge of the Avengers was somehow beneath him, and if she has to keep dealing with this sort of bullshit she might just lose it.

"So from what I understand," May concludes, sitting across from Coulson in his office, "Barton has been restrained and taken into custody."

Natasha is high above them, on the other side of a vent. Clint was right. It _is_ a good place from which to gather intel. She had been sent out of the room when May arrived, which was a clear indication that something interesting was about to transpire, and Natasha never misses interesting if she can help it. May's story had not disappointed.

"What the hell is she thinking?" Coulson very rarely raises his voice, but he does so now.

"She's thinking Barton needs to learn some goddamn respect, and who can blame her?"

Anger flashes across Phil's expression, there one second and gone the next. When next he speaks, he's gone back to being Agent Coulson — cool and collected and in control.

"If the other Avengers hear about this, we'll have a mutiny on our hands," he says.

"I know. Which is why I'm here, telling you this."

"They're no longer my responsibility, Melinda."

"Nonsense, Phil. No one believes that, not even you." She gets up, heading for the door. "Handle it before it gets out of hand."

"Fairly sure that ship has sailed," Coulson says softly to himself.

Not yet, it hasn't, but Natasha will make sure it does, because this this is exactly what she needed — a little luck, a little chaos, and the right amount of Clint being Clint.

She drops into an empty office and heads straight for the phone.

"Good afternoon, Agent Romanov. How may I be of assistance?"


	9. Chapter 9

The quinjet lands at midnight, and Coulson is waiting for it. He doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow when Natasha appears by his side, because he's known her for a very long time — long enough to know that the Black Widow always knows more than she should.

They wait in silence as the first agents start spilling out of the plane. No one who sees them looks surprised, and that's either because they're highly trained operatives who never give anything away, or because the only time Barton was in trouble and Coulson failed to appear was when he was officially (and actually) dead. Acker, who's worked with Coulson before, throws a sympathetic look his way as she walks past them.

Victoria Hand, when she finally appears, is the least surprised of all.

"Phil," she says by way of greeting. Clint walks out behind her, flanked by two heavily-armed STRIKE agents. Going by the state of his face, Quincy did manage to get at least one good punch in.

"Victoria," Coulson says pleasantly. "Could I have a word?" He doesn't so much as glance at Clint, who's trying and failing to project the air of unconcerned nonchalance of a man not currently being escorted out of a plane in handcuffs.

"If I knew I'd have a welcoming committee," he says, his smirk too forced, his levity too practised, "I'd have brought back souvenirs." It's one of the many reasons Clint always made for a better sniper than a spy — he's far too easy to read.

"Shut it, Barton," Hand says, gesturing for the two men to take him away before turning to Coulson. "No, Phil, you could not possibly have a word. I don't have the time, and what's more, I don't want to hear it. Come find me tomorrow, and we'll maybe discuss it then."

"I'm afraid it cannot wait until tomorrow."

"Is that a fact? And why is that?"

"Agent Hand." The voice makes them all turn, and Natasha can feel Coulson tense up next to her at the sight of the Avengers. Steve isn't wearing his uniform, but everything about him screams Captain America, from his long, purposeful strides across the room to his commanding, tightly controlled tone. "What is this about Clint getting arrest?"

They're all there except Rhodey, who's in Afghanistan, and Bruce who has too much sense to bring the Hulk anywhere near this, and Natasha could not have timed it better if she tried. They're none of them in uniform, none of them armed as far as Natasha can tell, but there's tension in the air that hadn't been there a second ago, and she isn't the only one picking up on it. There's SHIELD personnel all around them — agents and maintenance staff and the odd intern — and they're suddenly paying attention, suddenly inching just a little bit closer.

"Captain, this is a SHIELD matter."

"So he _was_ arrested?"

"Agent Barton disobeyed a direct order and assaulted another agent. There are protocols in place."

"Hawkeye would not have done so without a strong motive," Thor says.

"Why he did it is irrelevant," Hand says, and Steve visibly stiffens. "It's that he did it at all that is a problem."

"All due respect, ma'am," Steve says, "but if a man refuses to follow an order contrary to what he thinks is right, that is commendable."

"Not in our line of work, it isn't."

Sam rolls his eyes, and Tony scoffs, and the scorching look Steve gives Hand is full of censure and disapproval, but Victoria Hand has spent years dealing with disapproving men — in the army, in the CIA, in SHIELD — and she doesn't scare easily. She bears the full weight of his displeasure with all the ease of someone who knows herself to be right, whatever Captain America may think to the contrary.

"Perhaps we might take this conversation somewhere more private," Coulson suggests, because he's the king of de-escalation.

"This conversation has run its course," Hand says, because she'd rather be right than be smart. Without breaking eye contact with Steve, she adds, "This is a SHIELD matter, gentlemen, to be handled by SHIELD, and I'd thank you all to go home."

"Agent Hand," Steve starts again in a patient, measured tone, but Tony is done with niceties.

"Agent Hand, what Cap here is trying to say, is that you can either hand Jailbird over, or the next time you have this conversation will be with Bruce, and he's not nearly as patient as us, simple folk."

Coulson looks like he's getting a headache. Hand looks like she's getting one too.

"Threats will get you nowhere, Stark. Agent Barton is a SHIELD agent—"

"He's an Avenger," Sam says.

"He's a SHIELD agent," Hand repeats, stressing every word. "And this is a SHIELD matter, and you _will_ stay out of it."

"And who will make us?" Wanda asks, soft and sweet and dangerous, and Natasha can see the exact moment Steve realises how quickly this can get away from him.

Wanda is the most powerful person in a room with a god in it, but it's Barnes suddenly taking a step forward that has all the agents around them suddenly reaching for their guns. The Scarlet Witch might be impressive, but in a room full of spies, the Winter Soldier is practically a legend. He's the story told during late-night stake-outs, the monster hiding under the bed. It makes agents nervous who aren't nervous about much else.

"Alright, that's quite enough," Coulson says, glancing around him.

"I couldn't agree more." Nick Fury marches towards them, followed by Maria Hill. "Captain, I'd appreciate it if you could all refrain from intimidating my people. It's bad for morale."

"Director, we just want to take Clint home with us."

"And I want the Director of the CIA not to call me about one of my agents undermining a six-month operation. We all have to learn to live with disappointment."

"Fury, how secret do you think your secret organisation is gonna be after I set SI's legal department loose on it?"

"Stark, much as I'd enjoy going a few rounds of you and I trying to out-threaten each other, I have an agency to run and a powerful need not to put up with you. If I wanted a headache, I'd take the WSC's calls. Coulson, care to jump in at any point?"

Coulson sighs. "This is an internal SHIELD matter," he says, because he's first and foremost a company man. And then, because he's a company man who understands there's no profit in trying to out-stubborn Steve Rogers, he adds in a softer tone, "It's being handled."

Steve stares at him for a few seconds, and whatever he sees in Coulson's face must satisfy him, because he nods and says, "Alright then. But if Clint is still in a cell come morning, the Director and I will have words."

Which as threats go might lack Wanda's subtlety or Tony's panache, but is just as effective if not more.

They watch them leave in silence, and then Fury levels a glare at the SHIELD agents who had gathered around them. "Do none of you have things you should be doing?" he asks, and they all hasten to look busy and perfectly uninterested in the little drama that just played out in front of them. "Hand, Coulson, Romanov, with me."

He marches towards the door and they follow him in silence all the way to the top floor of the building. Fury's office is much like Hill's, but grander, more high-tech, with more places to hide the bodies of agents who've displeased him.

The Director does not invite Hand and Coulson to sit, so they stand as he takes his place on the other side of the desk, flanked by Hill, who probably knows all the ways to kill someone in this room and make it look like an accident, who probably used some of those ways on unsuspecting agents who pushed their luck too far.

Natasha jumps on the desk and sits, because if Hill hasn't murdered her by now, she probably isn't going to.

"Agent Hand," Fury says, "much as I understand the impulse to lock Barton up, you need to understand that there are politics involved in this job."

"All due respect, sir," Hand says, just this side of mutinous, "politics is how we ended up with an agent who not only flat out refused to obey a direct order, but who actively sabotaged a mission."

"And he'll be reprimanded for it, but we need to look at the big picture here."

It's a testament to how tired and aggravated Hand is that she replies to that with, "I'm sure the big picture will be of great comfort to the next person who falls prey to Amon Garcia."

Fury glares at her, and Victoria holds his gaze, back straight, head held high. Her duty is to SHIELD, not to Nick Fury, and if it is her job to follow his orders, it is also her job to speak her mind when the occasion calls for it.

"Agent Hand," Fury finally says, "I trust you have debriefs to oversee?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then kindly get on with it. You're dismissed."

"Yes, sir."

Fury waits until Hand is out of the room and then turns his attention to Natasha.

"Romanov, what the devil is this clusterfuck?"

 _You told me to handle it._

"Well, next time kindly handle it a little less. Three weeks infiltrating Colombian drug cartels didn't give me half the headache I'm getting right now."

It's not her fault that Colombian drug cartels are full of under-achievers.

"Coulson, effective immediately you're back in charge of the Avengers Initiative and if I hear another word about you wanting to go play house with May, I'll bury you under so much paperwork it will make the Chitauri invasion seem like a holiday. Are we clear?"

"Yes, sir," Coulson says. Next to Cap's demands and Tony's snark, and Victoria Hand's naked disapproval, it's easy to miss the fact that Coulson's easy acquiescence is almost as insolent as Clint's sarcasm — if less overt — but there is little Fury misses, and he's known Coulson a very long time.

"Glad it meets with your approval," he says. "Agent Hand is getting a promotion and a raise out of this, because no self-respecting handler should have to put up with the collection of spoilt, pampered, self-indulgent divas you call a team."

"Of course, sir."

"Agent Barton will be released to your custody and you will make it perfectly clear to him that next time he disobeys a direct order, I will demote his ass so fast the lunch ladies will have higher security clearance than him."

"Yes, sir."

"And I swear to god, Phil, if I have to keep dealing with this nonsense because you and Barton are too chicken shit to use your goddamn words, I'll transfer you both to fucking Siberia and leave you there to rot. If I wanted to put up with juvenile crap, I'd have stayed a high-school principal. Do I make myself clear?"

Coulson's carefully neutral mask slips for a split second and something like anger flickers across his expression. When he says, "Perfectly clear, sir," his tone is so polite and correct that it is just this side of insubordinate.

"Wonderful. Now get out of my office." Fury turns his attention to her. "And that, Romanov," he says, "is how you fucking handle it."

Considering she just achieved almost everything she set out to do and didn't even have to shoot anyone, she thinks she handled it just fine.

Natasha follows Coulson out of Fury's office, and trails behind him as he walks towards the elevators. He doesn't speak as they walk down the corridor, does not say a word as the elevator doors close behind them. They're half way down to the lower levels when he finally says, in the pleasant tone of someone who'd dearly like to strangle her, "There's so much paperwork in your future, you better hope we never find a way to turn you back."

Sticks and stones. If people were less predictable, she might be less effective. As it is, she can hardly be blamed for everyone else's shortcomings, and no one who knows her — certainly no one who knows her as well as Coulson does — should be surprised at finding themselves tangled in one of her webs. It's their own damn fault, really. If they were better at solving their own mess, she wouldn't have to solve it for them.

The elevator comes to a stop and the doors open to a room filled with consoles and security feeds. Isabelle Hartley, the senior agent on site, looks their way as soon as they step into the room.

"Agent Coulson, Agent Romanov," she says, "what a shocking and unexpected surprise. Phil, did you know Jasper had a bet going on who'd get Victoria to finally snap? My money was on Stark. Hell, most everyone's money was on Stark. Should've listened to Morse when she said only a fool would bet on Stark over Barton."

"Agent Hartley, I'm here to pick up Agent Barton." Coulson likes gossip as much as the next spy, but never on duty and never where anyone will notice.

"Yes," Hartley says with a knowing smirk. "Hill sent word. Agent Rahim, please take Agents Coulson and Romanov to Agent Barton's cell."

"Yes, ma'am."

She leads them down a narrow corridor until they come to a door no different from any of the other doors they've passed. Rahim presses her hand to the display on the wall, and after a second a disembodied voice says, "Agent Sarah Rahim. Access authorised," and the door slides open.

Clint, who's sitting on the bed across from the entrance with his hands still cuffed in front of him, looks up as them.

"If I knew I'd have guests," he says, "I'd have straightened up the place some." The corner of his lips curl up slightly, but the smile does not reach his eyes.

Coulson ignores the quip and gestures at the handcuffs. "Remove those," he says, and Agent Rahim reaches into her pocket for the keys.

"Are you sure, sir?" Clint asks with a hint of his usual smirk. "I'm told it's a good look on me."

Coulson says nothing, but simply raises an unimpressed eyebrow at Clint, who looks away after a second and lets Rahim remove the handcuffs without further comment. He rubs his wrists as soon as they're free, the skin red and chafed where it wasn't protected by fabric. It's a long flight from Prague.

"Let's go," Coulson says, and turns on his heels without stopping to see if they'll follow.

Clint pushes himself off the bed and stoops down in passing to pick up Natasha, who lets him without protest. He's tense and exhausted, and if Natasha is not who most people would turn to for comfort, that never once stopped him, and it never stopped her from being just who he needed her to be at any given moment. Just now she's soft and warm and a friend, and that's enough.

Coulson is waiting for them by the elevators, and it's a tense, silent ride up to the twenty-seventh floor. Coulson doesn't say a word, and for once Clint is all out of jokes.

"Romanov, take a walk," Coulson says when they reach their floor.

He thinks he can keep things from her. That's precious.

She jumps down from Clint's arms and watches them walk away for a moment, and then takes off in the opposite direction. The ventilation system that runs across most of the floors is sorely lacking in security, and in a building full of spies, someone should really look into that.

The vent that opens into Coulson's office is up by the ceiling in a corner of the room, and it gives her an almost unobstructed view of the floor below. Coulson's sitting at his desk and Clint is slouching on the chair across from him. Neither of them is speaking.

"Well?" Coulson finally says.

"Well what?"

"What happened?"

Clint doesn't reply for a moment, does not meet Coulson's gaze. When he finally does, his tone is even and his expression almost as neutral as Coulson's.

"Agent Hand gave an order," he says, sitting up straighter and looking back at the man sitting across from him. "I thought it was a bad one."

"Was that your call to make?"

"Considering it was my finger on the trigger? Yeah."

Coulson stares at him for a few seconds, distinctly unimpressed. "Try again, Barton."

Clint rolls his eyes. "No, sir. Not my call to make. Specialists don't have opinions. You point and we shoot, like good little assassins. Then we get a treat and a pat on the head."

Bobbi was right. Only a fool would have bet on Tony over Clint.

"This isn't a democracy, Clint," Coulson says, and calling him Clint is a cheap shot, but Coulson was never above using cheap shots when necessary. "It can't be. Assets don't pick what orders they follow. Even assets that happen to be Avengers."

"That's not— There were two kids in the fucking room."

"And Agent Hand was aware of that, because you told her. Don't you think she might have weighed that against all the other information she had?"

Clint looks away and does not reply. The problem wasn't the order. The problem wasn't even the kids. There are ways for assets to disagree with their handlers, ways for a different call to be made — Natasha is living proof of that. The problem was that Clint was too busy being difficult to be smart about it.

"You're off the field until further notice," Coulson continues, because the question is rhetorical and Clint wouldn't have answered it even if it weren't. "From this moment on and until such time as I decide you've learnt the value of listening to your SOs, your time will be spent on paperwork and on training junior agents." Clint rolls his eyes and then groans when Coulson adds, "At Langley. I'm sure our colleagues at the CIA will appreciate having someone of your expertise helping out with their new recruits. And you should count your blessings, Barton, because if it were up to Agent Hand, you'd spend the next month in lock-up."

"Why isn't it?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why isn't it up to Agent Hand?"

"Agent Hand is no longer in charge of the Avengers Initiative. The Director feels it's unfair to punish a good agent by inflicting you lot on her, so I have that pleasure once again."

Clint smiles, but only a little and only for a second. "I'm sorry," he says.

Coulson shrugs. "Don't be. There are worse things in life than being the guy who gets to tell Captain America what to do."

"Sir," Clint starts, and Natasha knows what he's about to say even before he says it. "I think it would be better— I would like to step down from the Avengers Initiative." And there they are again. "I'm not on their level anyway, and my skills might be better employed elsewhere."

Coulson does not reply for several seconds, does not so much as move a muscle. And then he pushes himself up from his chair and moves to the other side of the desk, leaning back against it, next to Clint.

"No," he says, putting his hands in his pockets. "You and I are going to stop walking on eggshells around each other, and we're going to find a way to work together. And we're going to start by talking about what happened in Beijing."

Clint makes a face. "Can't I go back into lock-up instead?"

"No," Coulson says, his smile a little amused, a little fond. "We get shot at for a living; we can manage a conversation."

"I don't know about that. Words are hard."

"Yeah, well, life is hard. We can pretend to be well-adjusted adults for five minutes."

"Maybe you can, sir, but I have it on good authority that I can't do well-adjusted."

Coulson snorts and kicks his chair. "Stop deflecting."

Clint smiles back at him, open and genuine, and then tilts his head back, looking up at the ceiling. "Fine," he says. "So, Beijing…"

"Yeah…" is all that Coulson says, and they're quiet for long enough that Natasha starts to think that Coulson might have overestimated the degree to which either one of them can do well-adjusted. "I'm sorry," Coulson finally says. "I shouldn't have kissed you." Clint's gone so quiet he barely seems to be breathing. "I'm your boss. It was inappropriate and unprofessional, and it crossed a line, and I'm sorry. I never meant to make you uncomfortable."

The look Clint gives Coulson is so genuinely puzzled that Natasha wishes there were cameras in the room to capture that expression.

"Natasha must be laughing her ass off," he says after a second.

Yes. Yes, she is.

"We can't both be dumb-asses, Phil," he continues, getting up. "And I got dibs." He's standing right in front of Coulson now, who doesn't move away despite how close Clint is. "You didn't kiss me. _I_ kissed _you_." He takes another step forward, right into Coulson's personal space. "Did you want to? To kiss me?"

Coulson's gaze darts down to Clint's lips. "Clint…" he says, soft and low, almost like a warning.

"Hey." Clint ducks his head slightly, catching his eye. "We're using our words here, sir."

A smile tugs at the corners of Coulson's mouth as he looks back at Clint. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I did."

And that's as much encouragement as Clint needs, because even he can't fail to connect _those_ dots. He closes the space between them, tugging Phil closer and kissing him, one hand on the back of his neck, another buried in his jacket.

"I'm still your boss," Coulson says, pulling slightly back, his words undermined by the fact he's still clinging to Clint.

"Yeah, well," he says, nudging Coulson's nose with his. "I always found that really hot." And then they're kissing again, and if somehow they find a way to misunderstand each other after this, Natasha might just have to murder them because they'll be beyond hope.

Without stopping what he's doing, Clint reaches blindly behind Coulson for a loose paper clip and throws it across the room without looking, hitting the grille straight on, because of course he knows she's there, and that's her cue to get lost. Natasha snorts softly and turns away, silently making her way to an exit point.

And that, Nick, is how you handle it.

* * *

 **AN:We're almost at the end; there should only be one more chapter to go. Unfortunately, this fic is going on hiatus for a few weeks, because I have a deadline coming up on another story I have barely started on. Deadlines are the devil... The plan was to have this one finished by now, but the best-laid plans of mice and men...**

 **In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the story up to here :)**


	10. Chapter 10

It takes Coulson a week to decide on Clint's punishment for messing up the Garcia op, and Clint only thirty seconds to decide he'd much rather strangle himself with his own bowstring.

He argues long and hard that making him give a series of lectures at CIAU is a waste of his talents and everyone's time, and doesn't Coulson remember Clint slept through most of his own courses at SHIELD? ( _"I'm a high school drop-out, sir." "You'll do six modules over three days." "I barely know how to add and subtract." "The class will have around twenty people." "Divisions of any sort are a mystery to me." "Agent Clara Ramirez will be waiting for you." "I can't even calculate a tip. Just ask Natasha."_ )

Clint points out that he's much better suited to a more practical sort of class; Coulson points out that letting him show off in front of a group of impressionable CIA recruits is no one's idea of a fitting punishment; and Hill points out that Avenger or not, she has the authority to make him spend the next six months as Jasper Sitwell's personal assistant. ( _"Do not try me Barton. I'm getting mighty tired of your bullshit."_ )

That's how Clint and Natasha find themselves in Langley, Virginia.

Clint is there because impromptu make-out session notwithstanding, Coulson has yet to forget he went rogue on a mission. Natasha is there because according to Clint, if he has to put up with the sorry collection of SHIELD rejects the CIA employs, so does she.

That's some deeply flawed logic right there, but it was either tagging along or letting Tony take another stab at turning her back, and the last discussion on the subject had included the words 'transfiguration ray.' ( _"Kind of like the makeover version of a death ray. What do you think, Bruce?" "I think thirty-six hour days is how you end up with ideas like transfiguration ray." "You say that like it's a bad thing."_ )

They're at the CIA headquarters because Clint balked at showing up at a place someone had unironically named CIA University, and they're in the big auditorium because news somehow got out that an Avenger was giving a lecture.

That or the CIA has an unusual large amount of agents in need of an intro course on mathematics for precision shooters.

"Gravity," says an elderly lady in the front row.

"That's right, Doris, gravity. Benson, hand Doris the trophy. You don't deserve it." Agent Benson chuckles and passes the small Hawkeye figurine someone had thought to bring to the junior agent in the row in front of him, who then passes it to the agent in the row in front of her, all the way down to Mrs Doris Lansing, who smiles and bows her head at her cheering colleagues. "Yeah, yeah, settle down, people," Clint says. "The HR department is back in the lead, and shame on all the rest of you. Gravity is another thing that affects a bullet's trajectory. So far we have wind, temperature, altitude, humidity, gravity, what else?"

Clint had been determined to be difficult; he had been determined to be the worst. SHIELD wanted him to teach CIA recruits? Fine. He'd teach them. He'd teach them real good. He'd be the most thorough, most painstakingly meticulous teacher they had ever seen. By the time he was done with them, they'd have formulas coming out of their ears. He would bore them to death if he had to bore himself to death to do it.

That brilliant plan (which had mostly consisted of Clint cutting off his nose to spite his face) had not survive first contact with the enemy, and Natasha is not even a little surprised.

Clint likes people. He likes people a lot. Even if they happen to be CIA. But most importantly, Clint likes showing off. He grew up in the circus. He likes the attention, he likes the applause, and he could never resist putting on a show.

And he doesn't need a bow to do it.

"Anyone? What else can affect a bullet's trajectory?"

"The Hulk on a rampage?"

"Accounting loses a point because Greg thinks he's funny." The collective groan gives away the location of the entire Accounting department. "Anyone else?"

"The Coriolis Effect," says a voice from the back.

"I'm not giving you the trophy, Quincy. You're still a dick." John Quincy smirks and flips Clint off. "The Coriolis Effect is one of those things snipers like to talk about 'cause they think it makes them look impressive. Basically means that because of the rotation of the Earth, if the distance of the shot is long enough, your target will have moved slightly by the time the bullet reaches it. Which is kind of cool, but also largely academic. The effect is minimal at anything under a thousand yards, and even at longer distances nine times out of ten you'll have bigger problems than the damn planet moving. Like an actual moving target. Or wind. Or line of sight issues." He points emphatically at Greg from Accounting. "Or the Hulk on a rampage."

"You're just bitter that you can't shoot an arrow far enough for the Coriolis Effect to matter," Quincy shouts over the general laughter, causing Clint to flip _him_ off.

"Why use a bow and arrow at all?" Mrs Lansing asks when the noise dies down.

"Doris, you wound me," Clint says, holding his hand to his chest. "I thought we had a good thing going here." He winks at her and the older woman chuckles, shaking her head. "Why use a bow and arrow? Anyone care to hazard a guess?"

"Because it's damn cool."

"That's right, Greg, it _is_ damn cool, and I don't even care that you're sucking up to me. Doris, pass the trophy to Greg. Accounting is back in the lead."

It's less a punishment and more a chance for Clint to show off in front of a group of impressionable CIA recruits and their equally impressionable, if more experienced, colleagues, and Natasha's fairly sure that hadn't been the point of this whole exercise, but she's not complaining. After all, she enjoys a good show as much as anyone.

No one so much as bats an eye at the orange tabby sitting on the desk behind Clint Barton of SHIELD as he carries on explaining things about elevation estimation, and windage formulas, and why John Quincy is a hack who should never be listened to, let alone humoured in any way.

Going around with a cat is exactly the sort of eccentric behaviour CIA agents have come to expect from their SHIELD counterparts, and there's no telling what sort of bizarre things Avengers are up to. Hawkeye knows the Scarlet Witch. Maybe the cat is a familiar. That's a thing, right? Or maybe he's just really attached to his pets. Who's to say? But in a world where superheroes exist and there's a true, bona fide superhero right in front of them, they have no attention to spare for the critters said superheroes carry around with them.

It doesn't bother Natasha, even if she's supremely tired of the whole fur and claws act. Spies do better in the shadows. She likes being an Avenger, and she values her place in the team, but it has had the unfortunate side effect of making her far too recognisable, and in her line of work, that's a hazard. She can work with it, but it's a hazard. Being this inconspicuous with so little effort on her part is a luxury she doesn't get to enjoy very often anymore.

She doesn't get to enjoy it for very long, however, because one moment she and Clint are alone in the raised dais facing the auditorium, and the next there's a tall, blond woman in a fitted green dress just a few feet from them. Natasha instinctively hisses, fangs bared and hackles raised, and Clint doesn't even turn before throwing a dagger he hadn't been holding a second before, left-handed, at the woman.

The dagger stops mid-air only a few inches from the woman's face and she looks at it, unimpressed. A wave of her hand is all it takes for it to drop to the floor with a clang.

"Verily, this is a most uncivilised welcome."

"Might just mean you're not welcome." Clint isn't the only one aiming a gun at Amora. There's more than HR reps and accountants in the audience, and even if most of the field agents among them did not feel the need to carry a weapon to a lecture, enough of them did that there's a small arsenal trained on the Enchantress. For all the good it will do any of them. "What do you want?"

"Must I want something, Clint Barton?" Her smile is bright and stunning and dangerous. "Maybe I'm just desirous of your company."

"Yeah, that seems likely. What do you really want, Amora?"

But the Asgardian is no longer paying attention to him. Doris Lansing shrieks when her phone turns into a snake in her hands, and shakes it off with frantic movements.

"Now, now, we shan't be friends if you insist on being disagreeable. One must not tell tales." There are startled shouts when everyone's smartphones and tablets and laptops rise up in the air, which turn into alarmed screams when they blow up several feet above their owners, showering burning debris over them. Most people duck for cover, but several agents open fire instead, and Amora immediately casts a shock wave in their direction, knocking back anyone still standing.

That's as much of an opening as Clint needs to lunge for the desk, where his bow and quiver are lying next to Natasha, who hisses at him despite herself, because everything around her is registering as a threat: Clint, Amora, all the CIA agents. There's too much noise, too much movement, and if she moves she'll bolt, so she stays put and growls and hisses, and tries very hard to remember who she is.

There's no more than a second between Clint grabbing the bow and an arrow flying straight at Amora's head. She stops it as she stopped everything else.

"How about you pick on someone your own size?" Clint asks, another arrow nocked and ready.

Amora smirks, eyeing the arrow that's still hovering in front of her. "You Midgardians always give yourselves too much credit. Do you fancy yourself someone my size, archer?" She touches the tip of the arrow with a finger and howls in pain when an electrical discharge runs through her body, causing her to fall to her knees.

"Can't do that with a bullet," Clint says with a smirk.

It's a band-aid on an open wound, and even Clint must know that, but before he can so much as move a muscle, Amora's eyes flash green and his own glaze over. All the way across the auditorium, John Quincy raises his handgun and fires a single shot, but the round never reaches the dais, because that very same second Amora waves a hand in his direction and a shimmering barrier immediately goes up between the dais and the rest of the auditorium. Without looking away from Clint, she rises gracefully to her feet, her smile sharp and dangerous.

And then the bow comes up and Clint releases the arrow, his eyes alert and focused. Taken by surprise, Amora is too slow deflecting the projectile, which grazes her cheek, leaving a thin red line in its wake.

"What is it with you lot and trying to get into people's heads?" He already has another arrow aimed at her. "Is this an Asgardian kink I should know about?"

The Enchantress chuckles, raising a hand to her face. "Loki was right," she says, staring at the blood on her fingers before turning her attention back to Clint. "You _are_ fun."

"What do you want, Amora?"

She pouts, tilting her head to the side. "I'm bored." God rid them of bored Asgardians. "And if Odinson is too busy with his Midgardian pet to amuse me, I must make do with what entertainment I can fashion for myself. She," she says, pointing at Natasha, "was diverting for a short while, but I find myself in need of a new plaything. And I'm told you make for an _excellent_ plaything, Clint Barton."

When the time is right, Natasha is going to take her sweet time cutting that pretty face to ribbons. And then she will find Loki, tie him to a table and pour a vat of molten lead down his throat. Neither of them will be bored then.

"Has Loki been singing my praises?" Clint takes a step back, the mirror image of Amora's step forward. "That's sweet. I didn't know he cared."

Amora's smile is that of a predator, all teeth and sharp edges. "You and I will achieve great things. You will assist me in taking down your little friends, and in exchange for your services I might even let you live."

"Tempting as that sounds, I'm gonna have to pass."

"Do not mistake that for a request, archer. You cannot win against me, and you'd be a fool to try. You are an insect. You are an ant. I _will_ take what I came for. Your agreement is of no significance."

"I just had the greatest feeling of déjà vu. Newsflash, lady: you can't get inside my head. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not doing shit for you, and you can't make me. And you might think you're so clever, taking out all the mobile phones, but the moment you walked in, Natasha activated the tracker in my bow. The other Avengers will be here in a matter of minutes."

"No more time for niceties, then."

Natasha anticipates her move just a second too late, and tries to dart out of the way, but she's too slow, and Amora's spells yanks her up in the air and squeezes all the hair from her lungs. And then it keeps squeezing. She can't stop the horrible sounds torn from her throat, can't help the distressed whines and whimpers as Amora's magic surges through her body, crushing bones and tearing flesh with slow, deliberate cruelty. She doesn't have any air left even to scream.

Clint shoots two arrows in quick succession, but Amora deflects them easily, her laughter loud to Natasha's ears.

"You cannot win against me, Clint Barton, but it does you credit to try. And because I am merciful, I shall offer you a deal. Give in to me and I will let her live."

"If you think I will bargain for her safety, you don't know me. Or her. SHIELD doesn't negotiate with psychotic bitches from outer space."

"You would watch your friend die?"

Yes, he would, and Natasha loves him for it. SHIELD has protocols for everything, even for this, but those are nothing to the promises she and Clint have made to one another over the years, the vows they've made and always kept. They've always had each other's back, they've always brought each other back, and they've never once let themselves become each other's weakness. And they won't start now.

Amora's smile falters for a second, and then one of the CIA agents fires a shot at the magical barrier and her smile widens again, sharp and dangerous.

"Would you watch them all die?" she asks, and there's suddenly a commotion on the other side of the barrier. The CIA agents, who until then had been relatively subdued, are suddenly shouting in alarm — some of them pounding on the doors, some of them emptying their clips on the locks or on the windows or on the magical shield keeping them all trapped like rats. "It is my understanding Midgardians need oxygen to live," Amora continues, as if commenting on the weather. Her expression hardens when she adds, "Soon they won't have any left. Would you have their deaths on your conscience?"

The sounds of their screams and shouts and sobs swells all around them on this side of the barrier, amplified by the Enchantress's magic, drowning Natasha's own choked shrieks and increasingly softer whimpers. There's darkness at the edge of her vision, and soon she won't be able to keep herself conscious anymore, but she still sees the exact moment Clint acknowledges defeat, even before he lowers his bow.

"Fine," he says. "You win. Goddamn it, I said you win. Let them go."

The crushing pressure on Natasha eases, and she almost chokes on the sudden influx of air that fills her lungs.

"So we have a deal?"

"I have conditions. If I go with you, you will let everyone here go, _unharmed_ , including Natasha. And you will make her human again."

"You make a lot of demands, for one in so weak a bargaining position."

"You want me, that's my price. And you can take it or stay here and argue about it until Iron Man blasts through those doors."

Amora smiles and suddenly the entire world turns and shifts around Natasha. The startled sound that coaxes out of her turns into a strangled scream as her bones change and shift, her whole body morphing and expanding and reshaping itself. When she drops out of the air, she tries to break her fall with human hands, tries to avoid hitting the table on the way down by kicking uselessly at the air with human legs.

The corner of the table hits her stomach and she stifles a scream as she rolls to the floor.

"I said unharmed." Clint's voice sounds different to her human hears: less nuanced, less detailed.

"'Tis but a bruise. It's of no consequence."

Natasha tries to clear her head, tries to push herself up, but her limbs feel alien and unfamiliar, and refuse to cooperate, and she can do no more than lie there, naked and weak like a newborn. She turns her head towards Amora, who's now standing only a few inches from Clint, his bow lowered and useless by his side.

"I've upheld my part of our bargain, Clint Barton. It's time you upheld yours."

"No," Natasha says, the sound catching in her throat. Neither Amora nor Clint so much as glance at her.

"She will kill you," Clint says, his gaze firmly on Amora. "She will find you and she _will_ kill you."

"She's welcome to try," she says, and then leans forward, kissing him — a soft peck on the lips that quickly turns into something more, and Natasha can almost see the exact moment Amora's spell locks on Clint. When she pulls away, his eyes are glazed over and far away, a slight green tinge to his pupils.

The sound of an explosion draws their attention to the other end of the auditorium. Steve is the first one to walk through the hole in the wall, his shield raised in front of him. The moment he does, Amora's magical barrier drops, and Natasha knows without looking that neither the Enchantress nor Clint are there anymore.

* * *

 **AN: Turns out my prediction of one chapter left might've been somewhat optimistic, and there's actually one more still to come.**

 **Hope you guys enjoyed this one :)**


	11. Chapter 11

"You're hiding something." Steve falls into step beside her and Natasha does not start, because she's human again and she refuses to give in to the skittish part of her brain that's still jumping at shadows.

"You're paranoid, Rogers. Anyone ever tell you that?"

"Perhaps. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong."

Heads turn towards them as they cross the busy lobby and Natasha ignores the attention and her own visceral need to be somewhere — anywhere — else. She was trained to make herself invisible, and trained to make herself the centre of attention, and she can handle both with cool-headed composure. And when she can't, she can damn well affect the appearance of cool-headed composure, and she's yet to meet the person who can spot the difference. She has testified before Senate subcommittees filled with angry men calling for her severed head on a silver platter without breaking a sweat; she can handle the lively interest of gossipy agents with too much time on their hands, and she can certainly handle Steve Rogers fishing for information.

"Shouldn't you be off somewhere planning a rescue mission?" The best way to deal with Steve is to give him something to do, anything that will direct his attention elsewhere. Nine times out of ten it works. Today he's choosing to be difficult.

"What's Amora after?"

"You'd have to ask Amora."

"Natasha—"

"Back off, Steve." She lets just a hint of frustration into her voice. Too much and Steve won't buy it; too little and he'll keep on pestering her. "I told you everything I know. Clint is my best friend. You don't want him back more than I do."

"I didn't mean to imply—" The muffled sound of something shattering against a wall inside Coulson's office cuts Steve short. They stare at the closed door for a second and then at each other. Natasha raises an eyebrow and points at the door.

"You want to handle that or should I?"

Steve runs a hand through his hair and sighs. "Probably best if you do. I'll go see if Wanda and Strange found anything."

Odds are good that they haven't, and that they won't. It's a wild goose chase and they all know it, even Steve. Wanda and Strange are both skilled, both powerful, but Amora has over a thousand years and more than a few tricks on them. They won't find her unless she wants them to. Thor has a better chance of getting Loki to talk, and no one thinks _that_ is likely to yield any useful results.

Natasha walks in without knocking, closing the door behind her. Coulson is facing away from the door, his hands on his hips, and he doesn't turn at the sound of her entering. The shattered remains of a SHIELD mug are littered on the floor by the opposite wall.

She leans back against the door without saying a word and waits for him to get himself under control. When he turns, his expression is carefully neutral, though there's obvious tension in the line of his shoulders, in the way he holds himself.

"The things Loki made him do," he says evenly, "it almost killed him. If she—"

He stops abruptly, looking away, but his attention snaps back to Natasha when she says, "I know what Amora wants." Maybe the reason people so often suspect her of keeping secrets is because she so often does. "And I know how to get her."

* * *

"Thor will never agree to this," Hill says, surveying the plans on Fury's desk. "Neither will Rogers, incidentally."

"Which is why we're not telling them." Natasha points at the schematics. "We'll place undercover agents here, here and here, and we'll have STRIKE teams waiting just outside the perimeter. Once the call goes out to assemble, the Avengers can be there in under four minutes."

"A lot can go down in four minutes." Hill's frown deepens as she picks up a glossy invitation. "And we only have five days to set it up. It would be tight."

"We've done more with less."

Fury leans forward, arms propped on the desk, and stares at Natasha.

"SHIELD has rules against using civilians for cover, and we certainly have rules against using civilians as bait."

"I know. So does Clint. If you want him to walk into a trap, it can't look like one."

Fury turns his attention to Coulson, who has barely said a word since Natasha first outlined her plan back in his office.

"Got anything to contribute to this conversation?"

Coulson doesn't reply straight away, but examines the schematics thoughtfully for a moment, before shaking his head. "There are too many civilians, too many variables we can't control. It could get ugly fast."

"Hill?"

Maria glances at Natasha for a second, and then down at the plans laid open on the desk.

"If this thing goes sideways, we'll have more than a PR disaster on our hands: we'll have an actual disaster on our hands. And even if everything goes according to plan, it could lead to a breakdown of trust with the Avengers. And we're already on some very thin ice on that front."

Fury leans back in his chair and looks at Natasha. "Does that seem to you like the sort of thing I should risk for one agent, just because he happens to be you friend and his boyfriend?"

"No, sir. It seems to me like the sort of thing you should risk because the last time something like this happened, Clint almost brought down a helicarrier." Right around the time he helped a megalomaniac psychopath kick-start an alien invasion, but Natasha's fairly sure no one in the room needs a reminder of _that_. "It's risky, yes. But we can draw her out on our own terms or we can wait for her to come to us on hers."

* * *

The fact that the American Astronomical Society is hosting their annual fundraising gala in Manhattan in five days time is just a happy coincidence. The fact that word somehow gets out that Doctor Jane Foster is being honoured at the event is less luck and more Natasha pulling at the strings of her carefully (if hastily) spun web.

In less than twenty-four hours reports of an award are all over the news, and dozens of articles, columns and puff pieces appear dedicated to the life and work of Doctor Jane Foster, brilliant scientist, renowned astrophysicist and girlfriend of Thor of Asgard, superhero, Avenger and alien royalty.

If the committee in charge of the gala feels the need to contradict the story, they quickly get over the impulse. For the first time in the history of the American Astronomical Society, they're having to turn people away from the event, which does much to bring them around to the view that they should indeed be honouring Doctor Jane Foster for her extraordinary contributions to the field. In fact, they have been remiss not to do it sooner.

On the same night as the gala, Tony will be attending the New York Academy of Art Tribeca Ball, because nothing says 'not a trap' like Avengers being very visibly elsewhere. Getting Tony on the list for the Tribeca Ball on such short notice is not without its difficulties — capturing Amora without anyone getting hurt and without destroying half of Manhattan might just prove easier — but adding events to Tony's calendar without him noticing is like stealing candy from a baby. Tony never knows what's supposed to be on it anyway, Pepper is in France on Stark Industries business, and JARVIS has a soft spot for Natasha.

Candy. From a baby.

Rhodey gets roped into accompanying Tony to the Tribeca Ball when JARVIS points out Sir needs a date, and given Sir's updated relationship status it is not to be supposed Miss Potts would approve of some of Sir's previous choices in that department. Perhaps JARVIS might suggest Colonel Rhodes? The Colonel might enjoy an evening of mingling with New York's upper crust, and past data suggests he can be relied on to prevent Sir from going on the sort of benders that usually land him on the cover of assorted national and international tabloids. ( _"JARVIS, I resent the implication that I need a babysitter." "Do you indeed, Sir?" "And I resent the implication that Rhodey is the calming influence in this relationship. One time at MIT he almost got us arrested." "Was this before or after you convinced him to help you hack into the school's mainframe?" "The details escape me."_ )

Bruce's routine is regular like clockwork, and on Mondays he shuts himself in the lab at the Tower and stays there until someone — sometimes Steve, often Tony — comes to either drag him to bed or to challenge him to a science off ( _"Like a dance off, but with science!" "Go away, Tony."_ ).

Wanda will either be at the Tower or with Strange, trying and failing to get a lock on Amora's location. Natasha can work with either.

That leaves Steve, Sam and Bucky, which is how Natasha finds herself in McCarren Park two days before the gala. Barnes is not hard to find. He's sitting on the grass, back against a tree, watching a group of kids play softball, and does not betray the slightest surprise when she sits down next to him.

"What do you need?" he asks after a few moments, attention still on the game.

Natasha hands him three tickets by way of reply, and he holds them with gloved hands, glancing down at them.

"A Marx Brothers Marathon?"

" _Duck Soup_ , _Horse Feathers_ , _Animal Crackers_ and _A Night at the Opera_ , all remastered. Should be fun."

"And who am I supposed to be having all this fun with?"

"Rogers and Wilson."

He looks at her then with a slight frown, but whatever questions he has, he keeps to himself. "With Barton missing, it won't be easy to get Steve to take the night off for something like this."

No, it probably won't be, but it's what she has managed to come up with in such short notice. Four minutes. That's the response time they're working with. Steve hasn't stayed put in one place since Amora took Clint, and while Natasha appreciates the dedication, that doesn't work for her in the slightest. She needs him at hand.

"Get Sam on board. If anyone can convince Steve he needs to take a break, it's the two of you."

"I'll see what I can do."

And that's not exactly the firm assurance Natasha is looking for, but she'll take what she can get. She stands and turns to leave, but doesn't take more than two steps before Bucky calls to her.

"Natalia," he says, his attention back on the game. "Make sure they pack my rifle. Last time I had to use a SHIELD-issue weapon, I had to keep correcting for a tilt to the left."

She bites back a smile. "Will do."

That's her entire board set up, and all that's left for her to do is hope everything goes to plan, which is usually where it gets tricky. People aren't half as good at following patterns as they are at breaking those patterns at the most inopportune moment, but as long as Amora shows up, Natasha can manage the rest.

She's pretty sure she can manage the rest.

Amora is not a complicated woman to figure out, not even when she has Loki pulling her strings, and mostly because both of them usually want the same thing: for Thor to pay attention. It's the immortal, supernatural version of school kids teasing the boy they like. It would be endearing if not for the death, chaos and mayhem that usually follow.

It may well be that the Enchantress does mean to use Clint to help her take down the Avengers — that's a popular enough plan with super-villains everywhere — but if it takes more than mild encouragement to make her go after Thor's 'Midgardian pet' first, then Natasha is a very poor judge of character.

Jane's an easy target: human, no powers, no super strength. And what better way to get Thor to pay attention?

The night of the gala is chilly but clear. When Thor, Jane and Erik Selvig arrive at the venue, the sidewalk is packed with photographers and reporters.

"Midgard's interest in scientific matters is indeed most commendable," Thor says, offering Jane a hand to help her out of the car. "I had not realised there would be so much press here."

"Sure, that's why they're here." Selvig holds up a hand against the rapid flashes from the cameras as he exits the car after Jane. "The pursuit of science."

"All press is good press, Erik," Jane says good-naturedly, smiling at the cameras.

"You're right, no doubt. I'm sure coverage from GQ and Cosmopolitan will go a long way to help us secure our funding."

The main lobby is crowded with men and women in tuxedos and evening gowns: scientists, donors, people who would really like to say they've spent the evening with an Avenger, but who don't have the pull or disposable income necessary to get into the sort of events Tony tends to grace with his presence.

Selvig quickly falls behind when he spots Amelia Haugen in the crowd — a _'shameless charlatan with preposterous and downright dangerous opinions on mass distribution in spiral galaxies'_ — and his indignant voice can be heard over the general chatter not two minutes later. Thor looks back with a troubled expression.

"Should we be concerned?"

"Oh, no. They're old friends. I expect they'll be trying to drink each other under a table before long."

It takes them a solid half hour to make their way past the lobby, and mostly because people keep stopping them to shake hands or exchange a word or take a picture. And many of them are interested in meeting Thor, who's always unfailingly polite and obliging, but most of them are people who know Jane (either personally or through her work) and who wish to greet her, or congratulate her, or discuss an obscure point or other.

They end up separated when a Mrs Catherine Alexander, a wealthy widow of a philanthropic disposition, decides she simply must introduce Thor to her friends, Dr and Mrs Chapman ( _"That's the second Mrs Chapman, mind. We do not talk about the first."_ ), and she very much hopes Dr Foster will allow her to borrow her dashing companion for a few minutes ( _"You do get to keep him most of the time, my dear. It won't do to be greedy."_ ).

Jane — who's in the middle of a discussion with a Dr Laura Nelson on the structural similarities between the Bifrost and the sort of wormholes opened by the Tesseract and how best to measure both — has no objection, and Thor is only too happy to help butter up old ladies with deep pockets, something Stark assured him was his sole duty for the evening.

When Jane finally makes it to the main salon, Thor is already there, all the way across the room, deep in conversation with Mrs Alexander and her friends, the Chapmans. Despite the distance and the crowd, Thor notices her as soon as she walks in, and he winks at her before turning his attention back to his companions.

Jane takes a moment to glance around the room. It's crowded, but not as much as the main lobby, mostly by virtue of being several times its size. One end of the room is taken up by a stage where a jazz band is currently playing. There's a dance floor close to the stage, but most of the room is filled with large round tables, elegantly set up for dinner.

There are three main entrance points: the door she just walked through and two more on either side of it. There's a small service door next to the stage, and the backstage area leads to the kitchen and to the emergency exit.

The far wall is taken up by four high, arched windows, and the ceiling is made up of an intricate frame of exposed beams. That's just her luck. That little detail hadn't been in the plan of the building.

"Dr Foster, what a delightful surprise."

Natasha schools her features into a smile as the voice in her ear identifies the man walking towards her as one Professor Kenneth Stentz, head of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton.

It's an evening of shaking hands and smiling brightly while parroting all the science babble fed to her through her comm, and Natasha could have done it in her sleep. She has infiltrated trafficking rings, and terrorist cells, and the Russian mob. Usually her biggest concern is not to get shot in the back of the head. Tonight her biggest concern is not to trip on the pronunciation of Raychaudhuri's theorem, Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates or Einstein–Cartan–Sciama–Kibble theory of gravity. So far she's three for three.

By the time they sit down to dinner, some of the nervous energy Natasha always feels while on a mission has started to abate. Amora hasn't shown up yet, and Natasha's starting to think that maybe she won't. Maybe they used the wrong bait, or it was too obvious that it _was_ bait. She can feel herself relax by degrees, and that's a dangerous thing for a spy. It leads to complacency, which leads to mistakes, which in her experience tends to lead to a bullet in the back of the head.

Or an arrow, as the case may be.

She's half paying attention to Thor's conversation with their table companions while keeping a discrete eye on the comings and goings around the room when the next course is served. Veal chops with morels and oysters, topped with a garlic-parmesan sauce. She takes a bite while pretending to listen politely to the young man sitting next to her, a fellow with no qualifications that she can discern apart from a very large trust fund, but who nonetheless feels compelled to explain to a world renowned astrophysicist the finer details of her own body of work. Not that Natasha _is_ a world renowned astrophysicist, but he doesn't know that.

It takes her no more than a second to catch on to the fact Thor has suddenly gone quiet, and she turns to find him staring at her with an odd expression on his face.

"Jane, I find I have a sudden desire to dance," he says, already getting up. "Would you do me the honour?"

He phrases it like a question, but it's not really a request, and Natasha does not mistake it for one. She's been made enough times to recognise it when it happens.

His hand closes around hers with an iron-like grip as he leads her across the room, and he holds her to him when they reach the dance floor, an arm firmly around her waist and his hand still dangerously close to crushing her own.

"Easy there, big guy," she says, smiling the sweetest smile she can muster. "I'm gonna need that hand at some point."

His smile mirrors hers as he slackens the grip on her hand. They look for all the world like the loving couple.

"Widow. I should have known."

"How _did_ you know?"

"I grew up with Loki. Do you truly believe I would fall prey to a mere disguise?" She raises an eyebrow at him, and Thor chuckles, turning in time with the music. "Jane does not eat shellfish."

A small ' _Oh'_ on her comm is accompanied by Darcy's laughter in the background, immediately followed by Hand's threat that if Ms Lewis cannot behave herself and be quiet, she'll have her escorted outside.

"Where is Jane?" Thor asks, a dangerous edge to his smile.

"SHIELD HQ. She's safe."

He glances around the room. "You're expecting Amora to show up."

"We're hoping she will."

"Why all the secrecy? Are you so mistrustful you will not rely on your friends?"

Yes, she is. But that's not why. "There were concerns you might object to using Jane as bait." Even if technically Natasha is the one who's bait.

"You've made her a target." His hand tightens around hers once more, and Natasha makes herself smile brightly as they move around the dance floor, the perfect picture of a couple smitten with one another.

"She was always a target," she says, catching movement up in the ceiling from the corner of her eye. "We just made sure we could control the variables. Kiss me."

Thor stops, startled. "I'm sorry?"

"Right now." She stands on the tip of her toes and loops a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him down, his lips soft and warm where they meet hers. Thor flinches when the needle on the back of her ring pierces the skin, but does not pull back until she lets go.

"What was that?" he asks, his face only a few inches from hers.

"Magic dampener. Highly experimental. Fitz-Simmons will be very happy to have you for a guinea pig."

Just then an invisible force tears Thor away from her and hurls him against the far wall, knocking down everyone in his path.

The band stops playing mid-song and there are shouts of alarm all around the room as several armed men file in through the open doors. Natasha doesn't pay them any mind. Her whole attention is on Amora, who's strolling leisurely across the room towards her. Somewhere to Natasha's right, Thor is trying and failing to break free from the spell keeping him frozen in place. Fitz-Simmons will be disappointed.

Somewhere above her, Clint has found his perch and odds are good that there's an arrow aimed at her.

 _"Four minutes,"_ comes Coulson's steady voice in her ear. _"Black Widow, you're up."_

* * *

 **AN: Clearly I cannot be relied on to accurately predict how close I am to finishing (there's a special circle of hell for writers who fail at outlines), so I will stop trying. But we're almost there, you guys! Scout's honour!**

 **Hope you enjoyed the chapter!**


	12. Chapter 12

One second Amora is right next to Erik Selvig, who looks like he might throw up, and the next she's right in front of Natasha, who indulges in all the tells she spent years training herself out of: shock, fear, the visible effort to hold her ground and not flinch back.

"My, my my," the Enchantress says, tracing a finger down the side of Jane's face. "What a pretty girl."

Thor redoubles his efforts to break free and shouts at Amora not to dare lay a hand on her, which either denotes an until now unsuspected penchant for the dramatic arts or a genuine concern for his very human, very breakable teammate, and isn't that just precious?

"Who are you?" Natasha allows a slight tremor into her voice — Jane's voice.

"Let's just say we have some friends in common. Isn't that right, Odinson?"

"If you hurt her, Amora, I will see to it that it's the last thing you do."

"Tut-tut. Aren't men absurd?" Behind the Enchantress, her flunkies — ordinary men in suits, and white coats, and flannel shirts that match their manly beards, armed with handguns and shotguns and knives — spread around the room, forcing people down on the floor. "What use is it to threaten me when you can't so much as move a muscle? I could flay her alive and you would be powerless to stop me." Her eyes are impossibly green as she stares at Natasha, her smile a little vicious, a little feral. "Though I don't think I shall. Perhaps I shall follow your example, Odinson. And your brother's. You're both so taken with these creatures that I find myself wondering whether I am missing out."

"Please…" Natasha says in a strangled voice. She can feel the magic tugging at her, can hear it whispering in her ear, soft and seductive. Her gaze drops to the other woman's lips, and the blush she feels spread across her cheeks isn't just for effect.

"Worry not, sweet girl." Amora's standing close enough for Natasha to feel her breath ghosting over her skin. "It's as easy as falling asleep."

"Amora," Thor growls, "I will tear your heart out."

"You first, princeling."

And perhaps it's Fitz-Simmons's magic dampener, or the fact that Amora is focusing most of her power on keeping Thor trapped, or Coulson's urgent warning over the comm not to let her kiss her, but Natasha's self-preservation instinct kicks in at the last second and she snaps out of it just in time to reach for the concentrated dose of MS450 (the famous magic dampener) hidden in the folds of her skirt and jab it into Amora's neck. The Enchantress's eyes go wide with surprise, and Natasha does not give her any time to react before spinning behind her and hooking an arm around her throat, driving her own knee against the other woman's and throwing her off balance just enough that Natasha can spin them both around and put Amora's body between herself and two of Clint's arrows. Amora manages to stop one of them, but the other buries itself on her side.

"He did tell you I'd find you," Natasha whispers in the woman's ear.

Amora chuckles. "Do you think you're a match for me, little spider?" She grips Natasha's arm and throws her across the room with little effort, rising to her feet and yanking out the arrow poking out of her abdomen. "I will teach you not to meddle in the affairs of your betters."

Natasha crashes on top of one of the tables, to the startled alarm of the civilians in its immediate vicinity. She ignores the sharp pain in her chest and the cutlery and broken china that dig painfully into her skin as she rolls to her feet, closely followed by a trail of arrows. She falls right into the arms of a very obliging evil-doer who does not have the foresight to keep some distance between himself and the Black Widow before trying to shoot her. Natasha quickly avails herself of his weapon, and shoots in Clint's general direction, forcing him to scramble out of the way.

She's surrounded by Amora's flunkies, which would be worrying, except that before any of them has the time to shoot her in the back, one of them — a lanky fellow in a Starbucks apron — howls in pain and falls to the ground, drawing the startled attention of the rest. Mrs Catherine Alexander jumps to her feet and shoots two other men before they have time to retaliate, and suddenly it's chaos. Undercover SHIELD agents spring up all around the room, taking down several of Amora's makeshift soldiers before they have the presence of mind to start shooting back. The agents have surprise on their side, and they certainly have the better aim, but Amora's lackeys — far more numerous — aren't shooting ICERs, and they don't care who they hit. Amora's magic makes them careless and reckless and rash, unconcerned with their own safety and everyone else's.

"Get under the tables," Mrs Alexander shouts in Melinda May's voice, and several of the civilians hurry to comply, but far too many are too terrified to do anything but stay where they are, on the floor, trembling while a war breaks out over their heads.

Natasha jumps on the closest table and runs towards the front of the room, jumping from table to table, trying to keep ahead of Clint's arrows while making sure they don't hit any of the civilians or any of agents. It helps that the tables are reinforced — SHIELD made sure they could withstand anything short of a rocket — and it helps that Clint seems pretty determined to take her down. It's standard operative procedure. Absent any orders to the contrary, the primary directive is to take down the biggest threat.

She stops short when Amora throws a blast of green in her direction, which quickly morphs into a blade, and Natasha can't duck out of the way, because if she does, it will simply hit whatever — or more to the point, whoever — is behind her. She braces herself, but contact never comes, because a shield intercepts the blade just as it is about to hit her, knocking it sideways.

 _"When this is over,"_ Steve's voice says over the comm, _"you and I are going to have some words about lying to your teammates."_ He jumps up to grab the returning shield and immediately throws it at Amora, who swirls out of the way and lunges at Steve with twin blades she hadn't been holding a second before.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Cap." A man in a suit tries to stab her leg, and Natasha kicks him in the head before jumping to the floor and round-kicking him again for good measure.

 _"Non-lethal force only, Widow,"_ Coulson says.

 _"Yeah, wouldn't want any goons getting hurt."_ Sam dives across the room and knocks three men down in passing, and the Second Mrs Chapman follows it up by putting them to sleep with her ICER. _"We were right in the middle of Duck Soup. If you're gonna deceive us with movie marathons, I'd at least like to finish watching the damn movies."_

 _"The Widow giveth, the Widow taketh away."_ Iron Man barges in through the window closest to the front of the room, showering broken glass all over the floor below, and over Thor, who's still stuck. War Machine flies in right behind Iron Man just as Tony is hit by an electromagnetic arrow, which fries his suit's electronics, causing him to drop like a stone. Rhodey dives after him, while another arrow explodes over the Falcon, dropping a net on him.

 _"Son of a bitch."_ Sam rolls on himself, trying to shake it free, but succeeds only in further tangling himself in the thing.

"Someone get Hawkeye down from there," Natasha says, exasperated, shooting what looks to be a Wall Street banker in the leg with the gun she got from another one of Amora's flunkies.

 _"Short of shooting him down,"_ Barnes says, his voice strained as he fights Amora with Steve, _"how exactly do you propose we do that?"_

Natasha bites back a curse as someone lunges at her from behind. They keep on coming. No matter how many of them SHIELD takes down, Amora's magic keeps fashioning new soldiers out of waiters and hotel staff and gala attendees. It's clever and devious and maddening, because there's only so many ICERs to go around, and they can't deploy against civilians the sort of force they normally would.

A portal opens up on the stage and out walk Wanda and Stephen Strange.

"Yes!" Thor shouts. "Release me from this infernal spell."

Strange stares at the comm on the palm of his hand with distaste before putting it on with a bored expression.

 _"Might I point out,"_ he drawls, _"that this is what happens when SHIELD does not do a sufficiently adequate job keeping Asgardian sorcerers off world?"_

 _"Duly noted,"_ Coulson says, unfazed. _"Doctor Strange, start evacuating civilians. Scarlet Witch, free Thor from that spell and help subdue the Enchantress."_

 _"On it."_ Wanda shoots a blast of red in Thor's direction as several portals open up under the tables closer to the front, causing them and the people hiding under them to disappear.

 _"And someone get Hawkeye down from his perch."_

 _"War Machine,"_ Cap says, _"get ready to catch him."_ He throws his shield straight at Clint, hitting the beam he's on with just enough force to make him lose his balance.

Clint falls with a startled yelp, but Rhodey catches him mid-air. It takes no more than two seconds for Hawkeye to swing up and stab an electromagnetic arrow into a joint, frying the amour's circuits and causing them both to fall heavily to the ground. Clint — who's spent many years perfecting the art of falling — manages to avoid being squashed by the armour and rolls safely to his feet, only for Iron Man, whose suit has finished rebooting, to immediately grab him by the back of his shirt.

 _"Easy there, Legolas,"_ Tony says, holding him off the ground. _"I'm going to start thinking you have something against my suits."_

Clint grabs another arrow and tries a repeat performance of his suit-frying trick, but Tony is expecting it and knocks the arrow aside.

 _"No. Bad archer. Will you just— Cut it out! Stop that. No! If you take another one of those stupid arrows— I swear Barton, I'm going to turn your room into a Tweety Bird-themed nightmare. Do not try me."_

At the back of the room, Coulson leads a group of EMTs and uniformed SHIELD agents to gather some of the injured, while Cap, the Winter Soldier, Thor and the Scarlet Witch keep Amora busy. Too much of her power is now focused on keeping the four Avengers at bay, and SHIELD is finally starting to gain ground against her shrinking number of lackeys.

Just as Natasha knocks out a hipster in a black turtleneck, a heavy clang is accompanied by Tony's exasperated, _"Oh, for fuck's sake."_

Before Clint can do more than grab his bow, she's on him, sweeping his legs from under him. He rolls easily to his feet and strikes at her with the bow, which Natasha easily avoids. She's better than he is, specially at close range — she's faster and stronger, all her movements instinct and muscle memory — but she's also injured, and wearing an evening gown, and pulling her punches.

When two of Amora's goons decide to join the fray, they're enough of a distraction that Clint manages to kick her right in the chest, throwing her to the ground and providing enough of an opening for him to turn his attention to the rescue teams. In one fluid movement, Clint brings his bow up and nocks an arrow, aiming it straight at Coulson, and Natasha does not think. She grabs the gun on the ground next to her and shoots him twice.

* * *

SHIELD medical patches her up and Natasha lets them. There's nothing much wrong with her that a band-aid and some Tylenol could not fix — a few cuts, a few bruises, the odd cracked rib — but it's standard protocol and she's a professional. And if the doctors seem somewhat more nervous than usual, the nurses a little more skittish, Natasha does not remark on it, but lets them get on with their work and avoids any sudden movements.

It's not unusual and they aren't the only ones. Natasha has been with the agency a very long time, long enough that people sometimes forget that the Black Widow was once a more feared operative than even the Winter Soldier, but many agents had front row seats to what went down in Manhattan, and many more have heard of it since, and Barton's bloodied body being rushed to the OR is a powerful reminder that Natasha Romanov's pretty smile and soft features hide some very deadly edges. Ruthless, they call her. Ice-cold. There isn't a single person in SHIELD who doesn't know Barton recruited her, who doesn't know they're the closest thing each other has to family. And yet she did not think twice before putting two bullets in him.

Natasha isn't oblivious to the attention or the whispers or the sidelong glances, but she doesn't let it bother her. Amora is in custody, they got Clint back, and there were no casualties. In her book, that's what a successful op looks like.

She walks out of the examination room at the same time Barnes walks out of the one next door, and he falls into step beside her as they leisurely make their way towards the waiting room.

"Nice aim," he says, his fingers briefly knocking against hers in a way that to a casual observer might have seemed accidental.

Natasha smiles, knocking her fingers back against his. "Nice timing."

They hear Tony before they see him, catching the tail end of his rant about modern-day snake oil, and SHIELD's poor excuse for an R&D division, and baby scientists who don't know any better. The waiting room is almost empty apart from Tony, Bruce and Rhodey sitting in a corner. Wanda and Strange are no doubt babysitting Amora until such time as Thor can disentangle himself from Jane for long enough to take her back to Asgard, and there's no sign of Sam and Steve.

"What exactly is in this thing?" Bruce grabs the vial of MS450 from Tony and holds it against the light.

"Nothing of use. It's glorified saline. It was probably just keeping the Enchantress really hydrated while she kicked our ass."

"Don't remember the Enchantress being the one to kick _your_ ass, Stark," Barnes says, taking the seat across from him.

"That's enough out of you, Tin Man. Want to tell us how long you knew about Lady Macbeth's little plan?"

Natasha smirks. "What makes you think he knew anything about it?"

"Don't even give me that. We all know about your little spies club, just like we know he's the Tom Hagen to your Don Corleone. Any time severed horse's heads start appearing in people's beds, odds are good that he put them there and that you told him to."

"Well, that metaphor unravelled quickly," Rhodey says, flinging his magazine on the table. "Any news about Clint?"

"They're still working on him," she says.

Sam walks in just then and drops to the chair next to her, his left arm wrapped in bandages. "I'm going to collect all of Clint's trick arrows and make a bonfire," he announces.

"I'll help you," Tony says. "Whose stupid idea was it to add EMPs to his arrows anyway?"

"Yours," Rhodey, Bucky and Sam all say at the same time.

"Well, I clearly did not think that through, did I?"

"Where's Steve?" Sam asks.

"Yelling at Fury." Tony glances at his phone. "Yep, still yelling. JARVIS is getting all of it. We can make popcorn and watch it when we get home."

None of them go anywhere for several hours, though. Shifts change, and agents come and go, but still they sit and wait for news. Steve joins them before long, dropping a hand on Natasha's head in passing, his fingers warm and gentle and reassuring. There's a lecture in her future, and she has no illusions to the contrary, a speech on honesty and trust and relying on her teammates, but just now he's being sensible of the fact her best friend is open on an operating table somewhere, never mind the fact that she put him there.

It's almost four a.m. by the time Coulson shows up, looking nothing like a man who's been up for thirty hours and who's spent the last of those hours coordinating clean-up crews and corralling the press, and organising the transportation of intergalactic criminals, all while his boyfriend underwent surgery. He's cool and collected, his suit immaculate, his appearance relaxed. Natasha might almost buy it, if she didn't know him so well. His movements are a little too stiff, a little too controlled, and there are lines of exhaustion in the corner of his eyes.

"Surgery went well," he says as they sit up straighter. "He's fine; he's awake. Natasha, you can go see him. He's in room 13B. Everyone else, go home. You can see him tomorrow."

Natasha does not need to be given permission twice. The sound of Steve and Tony — but specially Tony and mostly Tony — arguing about the petty tyranny of bureaucrats with handguns ( _"Come on, Agent, five minutes."_ ) follows her for a few meters and then peters out.

The medical wing is busy even this late at night — Clint wasn't the only agent in need of medical care — but no one bothers Natasha as she makes her way deeper into the building, and if the sight of the Black Widow walking up to the room of the man she just shot makes anyone nervous, they're smart enough not to voice that particular opinion where she can hear them.

The lights above the headboard — the only source of light in the room — make Clint look even paler against the white sheets of the hospital bed, but his eyes flutter open when she walks in, and the corner of his lips curl up slightly.

"How come," he says, his voice low and hoarse, "the first thing you do after getting your opposable thumbs back is shoot me?"

"It wasn't the first thing." She walks to the far side of the bed, away from all the tubes and lines. "First I kicked your ass."

"Not— Not as I remember it. I was totally kicking _your_ ass."

She chuckles, leaning down over him and kissing his forehead. "You had a moment."

"Damn straight." He closes his eyes for a second, and then opens them again. "Thank you," he says, soft and low, almost like a sigh. "For— You know."

"Don't mention it." She'd done no more for him than he would've done for her had the situation been reversed. "Now shush. Get some sleep."

"Bossy." His hand finds hers. "Stay?"

They couldn't drag her away if they tried. Natasha lies down on the bed, careful not to jostle Clint, and curls up next to him, her fingers laced with his. There's barely any space left, just enough that she won't fall as long as she doesn't move, and her bruised ribs object vehemently to the position, but Natasha doesn't mind. She did not think twice before pulling that trigger, and she'd do it again if she had to, but here and now in this quiet room, with Clint solid and warm against her, she can finally allow herself to feel all the things she buried deep enough that she could do the job: fear and doubt and guilt, and the overwhelming relief of him being okay.

The constant, rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor is soothing, like a lullaby, and Natasha lets herself relax. Coulson comes in before long, and smiles at the sight of them. Without saying a word, he grabs a blanket from the closet and drapes it over her, before sitting down on the armchair by the bed with his laptop. The last thing she remembers before finally falling asleep is the steady rise and fall of Clint's chest, and the familiar clack clack clack of the keyboard.

* * *

The jingling of keys is followed by the soft clink of a key sliding into the lock, is followed by a muttered curse and the loud ringing of the doorbell.

Natasha opens the door and leans against it, her smile a little cocky, a little smug. "Hello, boys."

Coulson looks less than impressed. "Is there a reason why I can't open my own front door?"

"Yeah, I changed the lock."

"Why did you change the lock?"

"Because I'd rather you weren't killed in your sleep by a high-school dropout looking to steal your TV set."

"I'm moved by so much concern," he says, grabbing the key she's holding and walking off towards the kitchen.

"Security system?" Clint asks too low for Coulson to hear.

"Obviously."

"There's food in my fridge," Coulson says, staring at shelves full of vegetables, and dairy products, and things that require assembling in order to produce an actual meal.

"Yeah, how about that?"

He turns towards them, swinging the fridge door shut. "If I have a new lock, does that mean you'll stop breaking in?"

Her face is the very picture of innocence as she turns to Clint. "Does that mean I'll stop breaking in, do you think?"

"I wouldn't count on it, no."

Coulson rolls his eyes. "Fine. But if you're here, you're making yourself useful. Start chopping vegetables; we're making dinner."

"I'd advise against that."

"Dare I ask why?"

Just then someone rings the doorbell, and Natasha really couldn't have timed it better if she tried. The moment Coulson opens the door, a flock of Avengers and their better halves spill into the living room, loud and animated and in high spirits.

"I see you finally changed that lock, man," Sam says appreciatively. "About time."

"Phil, where would you like us to put down all the food?" Pepper asks, holding a casserole. "Darcy, did you bring the chocolate mousse?"

"What's all this?" Clint asks as Coulson gets over the initial surprise and starts directing all the food towards the kitchen, like the conductor of the world's most dysfunctional orchestra.

"It's a 'We're Really Glad You're Not Dead' party," Rhodey says, handing Coulson two bottles of wine.

"We were going to do it at the Tower," Tony says, "where there's like, you know, space. And professional catering. But Romanov pointed out that the odds of Agent here taking you there instead of kidnapping you for a weekend of wild and rather ill-advised sex, really, considering the time in the not so distant past when you were shot twice — but, you know, no judgement — were really slim to none. So here we are. With booze and baked goods."

Coulson gives Natasha a look, and she shrugs. That isn't exactly what she said, and it's hardly her fault Tony likes to embellish.

"Son of Coul, we bring ale for the feast," Thor says in a booming voice as he walks through the door, followed by Jane and Bruce, who's carrying a cake box.

It's a mad house. There's enough food for a small army, and enough alcohol for a somewhat larger one, and not enough space for any of it, but no one seems to mind as they talk loudly and laugh often and drink to each others' health. Clint leans against Coulson's legs, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, even as he looks ready to drop, and Coulson — who's standing by his chair — runs a hand distractedly through his hair as he discusses the use of tax havens by large corporations with Pepper.

Tony and Rhodey are laying bets on who would win in an arm wrestling contest, Bucky or the Hulk, with neither intended participant looking the least interested in putting the matter to the test ( _"Come on, Bruce. For science."_ ). Thor, for his part, believes the question to be moot, since even if the Winter Soldier were to win, the use of the bionic arm made it unsportsmanlike, which prompts Wanda to offer the view that gamma rays are no different than the bionic arm, which leads to a whole new discussion on the fairness of body-enhancements for arm wrestling purposes.

"You got lucky," Steve says, handing Natasha a beer. Next to them, Jane and Stephen Strange are having an animated discussion on the nature and properties of the mirror dimension.

"It wasn't luck." Not entirely, though some degree of luck had certainly helped. The look Steve gives her is half scepticism and half exasperation, and all fondness. He shakes his head, looking away, and Natasha bumps her shoulder against his. "Stop worrying, Cap. Everything turned out alright."

"Just saying you should trust your friends, is all."

"I trusted you to show up." Four minutes. Four minutes, and too many civilians, and Amora's magic tugging at her brain. Natasha can still feel it. She does not trust very often, and she does not trust very much, but she trusted them to have her back. Despite all the secrets and all the lies, she always trusts them to have her back.

Steve stares at her with serious eyes for a few seconds and then nods, touching the neck of his beer bottle to hers. A sudden burst of activity draws their attention to the corner of the room where Tony is now arm wrestling Bucky's human arm.

"Well, that will end badly," Steve says, getting up.

Natasha pulls her feet up under her on the couch and watches with ill-concealed amusement as Tony inevitably loses. He immediately declares that what they should do — what they should have done from the start — is try the bionic arm against his armour, but before any of them can follow suit, Tony's phone suddenly goes off, followed by everyone else's.

"Incident in New Jersey," Coulson says, already moving to grab his service weapon.

"Where to?" Strange asks, yellow sparks flickering around his wrists.

"Avengers Tower," Steve says. "All our gear is there."

"Don't even think about it." Coulson places a hand on Clint's shoulder as he makes to get up. "You're not going anywhere."

"I'll stay in the quinjet."

"You'll stay right here. Don't make me cuff you to the chair."

"Don't worry, Phil," Pepper says pleasantly. "We'll make sure he behaves."

The last thing Natasha hears before crossing Strange's portal is Clint grumbling about how the already has one redhead running his life; he doesn't need another one.

"How come we never get to have the night off?" Sam asks, reaching for his wings.

"There's no rest for the wicked." Tony's disassembled suit is immediately on him the moment he sets foot in the Tower. The faceplate is the last piece to click into place. "Race you to New Jersey." And he's off, immediately followed by War Machine.

"JARVIS, fire up the quinjet," Natasha says, zipping up her suit, and grabbing her Widow's Bite.

"On it, Agent Romanov."

Static precedes Coulson's voice loud and clear through their comms. _"Alright, we seem to be dealing with some sort of giant lizard-human hybrid. Iron Man and War Machine, keep your distance and wait for us to get there. And guys, let's all try to make it to the end of the night without anyone being turned into anything they shouldn't."_

 **The End**

* * *

 **AN: Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it :)**


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